Egocentric space-distorting visualizations for rapid environment exploration in mobile mixed reality

Abstract

Most of today's mobile internet devices contain facilities to display maps of the user's surroundings with points of interest embedded into the map. Other researchers have already explored complementary, egocentric visualizations of these points of interest using mobile mixed reality. Being able to perceive the point of interest in detail within the user's current context is desirable, however, it is challenging to display off-screen or occluded points of interest. We have designed and implemented space-distorting visualizations to address these situations. While this class of visualizations has been extensively studied in information visualization, we are not aware of any attempts to apply them to augmented or mixed reality. Based on the informal user feedback that we have gathered, we have performed several iterations on our visualizations. We hope that our initial results can inspire other researchers to also investigate space-distorting visualizations for mixed and augmented reality.