Immersive Analytics 2.0: Spatial and Embodied Sensemaking

Abstract

Immersive Analytics is now a fully emerged research topic that spans several research communities, including Human-Computer Interaction, Data Visualisation, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Immersive Analytics research has identifed and validated benefts of using embodied, 3D spatial immersive environments for visualisation and have shown benefts in the efective use of space and 3D interaction to explore complex data. As of today, most studies in Immersive Analytics have focused on exploring novel visualisation techniques in 3D embodied immersive environments. Thus far, there is a lack of fundamental study in this feld that clearly compares immersive versus non immersive platforms for analytics purposes, and frmly delineates the benefts of immersive environments for analytic tasks. We feel that it is time to establish an agenda to assess the benefts and potential of immersive technologies, spatial interfaces, and embodied interaction to support sensemaking, data understanding, and collaborative analytics. This workshop will aim at putting this agenda together, by gathering international experts from Immersive Analytics and related felds to defne which studies need to be conducted to assess the efect of embodied interaction on cognition in data analytics.

Towards an Understanding of Distributed Asymmetric Collaborative Visualization on Problem-solving

“…Participants in the formative study suggested having a more immersive VR experience. Moreover, recent research has investigated the benefit of using the large display space in VR for sensemaking and data analysis [16,37]. For example, by utilizing spatial references, users increased their memory of the content of the documents [63].…”

“…Besides utilizing the unlimited space, we deployed more natural and embodied interactions, instead of WIMP-like interaction, for node-link graphs in VR. Embodied interactions are promised to benefit immersive analytics [16]. Recent works [11,55,65,67,69] utilized embodied interactions to increase the effectiveness and engagement during data analysis.…”

Immersive Analytics Spaces and Surfaces

“…This workshop builds on a previous series of workshops in Immersive Analytics beginning with a NII Shonan Seminar (2015), a Dagstuhl seminar (2016), and workshops at ACM ISS 2016 [3] and IEEE VIS 2017 [1], which focused on establishing Immersive Analytics as a new research field and building a research community. Three more recent workshops at ACM CHI 2019 [2], ACM CHI 2020 [5] and ACM CHI 2022 [7] were focused on further engaging members of the CHI research community in this new field, and establishing several Grand Challenges for Immersive Analytics that have emerged after several years of effort [6].…”