Toward Agile Situated Visualization: An Exploratory User Study
This work addresses the problem of enabling agile visualization programming in immersive environments for experts, but it is incremental as it builds on existing SV concepts with a new toolkit and small-scale study.
The researchers tackled the feasibility of agile situated visualization (SV) by developing AVAR, a toolkit for immersive environments, and conducted an exploratory study with seven expert users using a HoloLens. The result showed that agile SV is feasible, with liveness boosting engagement, leading to highly interactive sessions where participants spent a median of at least 1.5 hours using the toolkit.
We introduce AVAR, a prototypical implementation of an agile situated visualization (SV) toolkit targeting liveness, integration, and expressiveness. We report on results of an exploratory study with AVAR and seven expert users. In it, participants wore a Microsoft HoloLens device and used a Bluetooth keyboard to program a visualization script for a given dataset. To support our analysis, we (i) video recorded sessions, (ii) tracked users' interactions, and (iii) collected data of participants' impressions. Our prototype confirms that agile SV is feasible. That is, liveness boosted participants' engagement when programming an SV, and so, the sessions were highly interactive and participants were willing to spend much time using our toolkit (i.e., median >= 1.5 hours). Participants used our integrated toolkit to deal with data transformations, visual mappings, and view transformations without leaving the immersive environment. Finally, participants benefited from our expressive toolkit and employed multiple of the available features when programming an SV.