VirtualDesk: A Comfortable and Efficient Immersive Information Visualization Approach

Abstract

Figure 1: In the VirtualDesk prototype, data is rendered at arm's reach and manipulated only by mid-air natural hand gestures (center). A reproduction of the analyst's real desk is included (left) to enable tangible interaction with coordinated views and controls (right). Abstract3D representations are potentially useful under many circumstances, but suffer from long known perception and interaction challenges. Current immersive technologies, which combine stereoscopic displays and natural interaction, are being progressively seen as an opportunity to tackle this issue, but new guidelines and studies are still needed, especially regarding information visualization. Many proposed approaches are impractical for actual usage, resulting in user discomfort or requiring too much time or space. In this work, we implement and evaluate an alternative data exploration metaphor where the user remains seated and viewpoint change is only realisable through physical movements. All manipulation is done directly by natural mid-air gestures, with the data being rendered at arm's reach. The virtual reproduction of the analyst's desk aims to increase immersion and enable tangible interaction with controls and two dimensional associated information. A comparative user study was carried out against a desktop-based equivalent, exploring a set of 9 perception and interaction tasks based on previous literature and a multidimensional projection use case. We demonstrate that our prototype setup, named VirtualDesk, presents excellent results regarding user comfort and immersion, and performs equally or better in all analytical tasks, while adding minimal or no time overhead and amplifying user subjective perceptions of efficiency and engagement. Results are also contrasted to a previous experiment employing artificial flying navigation, with significant observed improvements.

The Impact of Immersion on Cluster Identification Tasks

“…On the other hand, participants were slightly more accurate and subjectively more engaged using the VR scatterplot. In a follow-up study, Wagner Filho et al [57] present and evaluate an analysis environment in which the user is seated and interacting with scatterplot visualizations using gestures. The authors further investigated user capapabilities to evaluate dimension reduced 3D scatterplot visualizations in immersive and screen-based scenarios [16].…”

Evaluating an Immersive Space-Time Cube Geovisualization for Intuitive Trajectory Data Exploration

“…This was confirmed by the Likert-scale data, where 16/20 considered it easy to find the required information and 18/20 considered this technique comfortable, compared with 6/20 and 8/20 in Desktop, respectively. Even though this is not the first time an immersive visualization system has presented lower workload than its desktop-based counterpart [51], each specific representation has its own particularities in terms of required interactions and informationseeking activities, demanding an independent evaluation. Considering the large number of possible interactions and low previous familiarity of participants with the proposed interactions, and even though we expected to see such behavior (H6 and H7), we were still surprised with the large observed differences between conditions.…”

“…Oculus Touch hand controllers were used to track users' hands and to implement the hand gestures. However, all interactions are controller-agnostic, since they do not rely on any specific controller buttons [51]. To minimize user discomfort [58], adequate computing and graphics hardware ensured a frame rate above 80 FPS.…”

“…Finally, we also updated the original VirtualDesk method of calibrating the desk's position by placing the hand controllers at a predefined location [51] with a new refined height adjustment method that asks the user to touch the desk's surface, which reduces the effect of any mis-calibration due to different real and virtual hand sizes.…”

“…3). Moreover, we decided to base our work on a virtual desk metaphor for seated exploration [51]. The STC's base map is coupled to the surface of a virtual representation of the analyst's real work desk.…”