We introduce ImAxes immersive system for exploring multivariate data using fluid, modeless interaction. The basic interface element is an embodied data axis. The user can manipulate these axes like physical objects in the immersive environment and combine them into sophisticated visualisations. The type of visualisation that appears depends on the proximity and relative orientation of the axes with respect to one another, which we describe with a formal grammar. This straight-forward composability leads to a number of emergent visualisations and interactions, which we review, and then demonstrate with a detailed multivariate data analysis use case.

ImAxes: Immersive Axes as Embodied Affordances for Interactive Multivariate Data Visualisation

This paper presents DXR, a toolkit for building immersive data visualizations based on the Unity development platform. Over the past years, immersive data visualizations in augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR) have been emerging as a promising medium for data sense-making beyond the desktop. However, creating immersive visualizations remains challenging, and often require complex low-level programming and tedious manual encoding of data attributes to geometric and visual properties. These can hinder the iterative idea-to-prototype process, especially for developers without experience in 3D graphics, AR, and VR programming. With DXR, developers can efficiently specify visualization designs using a concise declarative visualization grammar inspired by Vega-Lite. DXR further provides a GUI for easy and quick edits and previews of visualization designs in-situ, i.e., while immersed in the virtual world. DXR also provides reusable templates and customizable graphical marks, enabling unique and engaging visualizations. We demonstrate the flexibility of DXR through several examples spanning a wide range of applications.

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DXR: A Toolkit for Building Immersive Data Visualizations

Immersive technologies such as augmented reality devices are opening up a new design space for the visual analysis of data. This paper studies the potential of an augmented reality environment for the purpose of collaborative analysis of multidimensional, abstract data. We present ART, a collaborative analysis tool to visualize multidimensional data in augmented reality using an interactive, 3D parallel coordinates visualization. The visualization is anchored to a touch-sensitive tabletop, benefiting from well-established interaction techniques. The results of group-based, expert walkthroughs show that ART can facilitate immersion in the data, a fluid analysis process, and collaboration. Based on the results, we provide a set of guidelines and discuss future research areas to foster the development of immersive technologies as tools for the collaborative analysis of multidimensional data.

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Clusters, Trends, and Outliers: How Immersive Technologies Can Facilitate the Collaborative Analysis of Multidimensional Data

Immersive analytics (IA) is a new term referring to the use of immersive technologies for data analysis. Yet such applications are not new, and numerous contributions have been made in the last three decades. However, no survey reviewing all these contributions is available. Here we propose a survey of IA from the early nineties until the present day, describing how rendering technologies, data, sensory mapping, and interaction means have been used to build IA systems, as well as how these systems have been evaluated. The conclusions that emerge from our analysis are that: multi-sensory aspects of IA are under-exploited, the 3DUI and VR community knowledge regarding immersive interaction is not sufficiently utilised, the IA community should focus on converging towards best practices, as well as aim for real life IA systems.

Survey of Immersive Analytics

We introduce IATK, the Immersive Analytics Toolkit, a software package for Unity that allows interactive authoring and exploration of data visualisation in immersive environments. The design of IATK was informed by interdisciplinary expert-collaborations as well as visual analytics applications and iterative refinement over several years. IATK allows for easy assembly of visualisations through a grammar of graphics that a user can configure in a GUI-in addition to a dedicated visualisation API that supports the creation of novel immersive visualisation designs and interactions. IATK is designed with scalability in mind, allowing visualisation and fluid responsive interactions in the order of several million points at a usable frame rate. This paper outlines our design requirements, IATK's framework design and technical features, its user interface, as well as application examples.

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IATK: An Immersive Analytics Toolkit

Immersive Analytics is an emerging research thrust investigating how new interaction and display technologies can be used to support analytical reasoning and decision making. The aim is to provide multi-sensory interfaces that support collaboration and allow users to immerse themselves in their data in a way that supports real-world analytics tasks. Immersive Analytics builds on technologies such as large touch surfaces, immersive virtual and augmented reality environments, sensor devices and other, rapidly evolving, natural user interface devices. While there is a great deal of past and current work on improving the display technologies themselves, our focus in this position paper is on bringing attention to the higher-level usability and design issues in creating effective user interfaces for data analytics in immersive environments.

Elliot Wilson

Papers

Immersive Analytics