Abstract
Collaboration is an essential part of data analysis, allowing multiple users to combine their expertise and to debate about the interpretation of data discoveries using their contextual knowledge. The design of collaborative interfaces within the context of Immersive Analytics remains challenging, particularly due to the various user-centered characteristics of immersive technologies. In this article, we present the use case of a system that enables multiple users to synchronously explore the same data in a collaborative scenario that combines immersive and non-immersive interfaces in an asymmetric role setup. Such a setup allows for bridging the gap when applying heterogeneous display and interaction technologies, enabling each analyst to have an independent and different view of the data, while maintaining important collaborative aspects during the joint data exploration. We developed an immersive VR environment (head-mounted display, 3D gestural input) and a non-immersive desktop terminal (monitor, keyboard and mouse) centered around spatio-temporal data exploration. Supported through a real-time communication interface, synchronous collaborative features are integrated in both interfaces, facilitating the users in their ability to establish a shared context and to make spatio-temporal references. We conducted an empirical evaluation with five participant pairs (within-subject design) to investigate aspects of usability, user engagement, and collaboration during a confirmative analysis task. Synthesis of questionnaire results in combination with additional log file analysis, audio activity analysis, and observations, revealed good usability scores, high user engagement, as well as overall close and balanced collaboration of enthusiastic pairs during the task completion independent of their interface type, validating our system approach in general. Further supported through the self-constructed Spatio-Temporal Collaboration Questionnaire, we are able to contribute with discussion and considerations of the presented scenario and the synchronous collaborative features for the design of similar applications.
Highlights
Immersive technologies have been experiencing a renaissance in the recent years
Within the overall context of Collaborative Immersive Analytics (CIA) and a focus on multivariate data, our research objective was centered on the bridging between immersive and non-immersive interfaces, working towards anticipated multimodal analysis workflows that allow multiple users together to explore and interact with data
Informed by literature in regard to the current state-of-the-art CIA as well as asymmetric Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, we provided considerations and relevance that further motivated our work in this direction
Summary
Immersive technologies have been experiencing a renaissance in the recent years. Hardware technologies that support immersive Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) experiences, for example head-mounted display (HMD), handheld, and tracking devices, have become increasingly ubiquitous over the past decade. Collaboration and its various aspects is considered a major topic in the current challenges of IA (Ens et al, 2021) Collaboration within this context is not limited to scenarios where each collaborator uses the same display and interaction technologies, nor should it be. When users are not using the same system to work together but different ones, that may be based on different technologies, this endeavour arguably becomes more complex, as design objectives need to be met for multiple systems Such asymmetric collaboration scenarios that feature different types of technologies commonly implement a kind of expert–novice relationship between its users (Ens et al, 2019), even though an interplay between equal professionals is desired (Isenberg et al, 2011; Billinghurst et al, 2018; Thomsen et al, 2019)
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