Augmented and Physical reality environments used in collaborative visual analysis

Overview & Synopsis

The amount of data produced every day is constantly growing. This mass of raw information requires finding solutions to analyze and visualize it.Wall displays are a good candidate to solve this issue, allowing to display a large amount of data.However, they are shared devices made to accommodate several people, which does not allow for the existence of a private workspace. Moreover, wall displays are still physical devices that can not be easily extended when the content to display becomes too large.In this manuscript, I explore the combination of Augmented Reality (AR) and a wall display to: first, add a personalized information space onto a wall display; and second, extend the rendering space. We focus on using an augmented reality headset (AR-HMD) to display content complementary to the context offered by the wall. We study the synergy of these two devices through two research questions: RQ1 - How can AR assist exploration and navigation of a network on a wall display, through personal view and navigation?RQ2 - How does extending the screen space of a wall display using AR changes users’ space exploitation during a collaborative session?For RQ1, I study the case of using AR with a wall display for navigating networks. I present four techniques, proposing different visual aid mechanisms for navigation. I then evaluate these four techniques in two experiments, one for low accuracy path following in the network (path selection) and one for high accuracy path following (path tracing). We report that for the path selection task, a persistent connection between the cursor in AR and the network on the wall obtained better results. In the case of path tracing, we observe that a lighter connection offered better performance. Moreover, we show the feasibility of a system where the interaction is done privately in AR for network navigation on shared screens.For RQ2, I focus on the space available in front of the wall display and consider using AR to extend the wall display. I present a system extending a wall display with AR, taking advantage of the space in front of the wall. We compare our system that combines a wall display with AR with a wall display alone using two collaborative tasks.We observe that users extensively use the available virtual space with our system. Although this creates an additional cost of interaction, we observe no performance difference and a real benefit of this extra space.The complexity of setting up the previously studied systems led us to study a cheaper way to use a wall display: RQ3 - Can we emulate a wall display inside a VR headset?This question has many aspects, and I focus on the capacity for VR headsets to reach the necessary resolution to replicate the user experience of a high-resolution wall display. For this, we study the optic model of VR headsets and compare it to the human vision model. Our analysis indicates that current headsets need a higher resolution to emulate a wall display. We confirm our analysis by running a pilot study comparing a wall display, two VR headsets, and an emulation of a perfect VR headset.I conclude this manuscript by discussing the different ways for a wall display to be combined with AR headsets, the requirements for replacing wall displays by VR/AR headsets, and by elabo- rating on the future work this thesis opens.