Can you imagine how cool it would be to interact with your graph visualizations during your next meeting in a Virtual Reality environment? If your answer is yes, then we have you covered in this article. A research team from Germany has created a perfect tool to answer your needs.
Whenever we talk about how the future might look like, one of the first things that come to our mind is the integration of virtual reality into everyday lives. We have seen movies and TV Shows where people live a second life in a Virtual Environment with a completely immersive experience and some which show only snippets of their life being enhanced by virtual reality. One of the most common examples of such snippets is virtual-reality boardroom meetings. This shows an inherent human desire for such technological advancement and innovation. This coupled with the development of more consumer-friendly VR technologies in recent times has led to an increased interest in the development of such VR applications. Additionally, the pandemic motivated a shift in how we work towards a greater focus on online collaboration. This generated interest in developing online tools that support collaboration and related research.
A team of researchers from the Institute for Software Technology, German Aerospace Center (DLR) presented one such idea at the EuroVis 2021 conference in their paper “Towards a Collaborative Experimental Environment for Graph Visualization Research in Virtual Reality”. It turns out is not only cool but also impressively effective. Typically implementing collaborative graph visualizations can be very resource-consuming and existing prototypes cannot be reused easily, but the German research team developed a highly modular virtual environment that can solve this drawback by visualizing graphs in collaborative virtual environments. This virtual environment contains all the fundamental functionality of collaborative graph visualization and provides common interaction techniques. The modularity of the virtual environment makes reusability easier, thus enabling researchers to create and evaluate different modules of visualizations in the same environment for a wide range of experiments.
But before we go to discuss the working of their tool, let us look at why choosing a virtual reality space for a collaborative environment when visualizing graphs can be helpful. → Virtual reality can enable a shared sense of space between team members and allow for more natural discussion. If team members want to illustrate and communicate their points to their peers, they can easily do so by directly interacting with the visualization using their hands and their peers will be able to understand the interactions and communications in real-time. Additionally, graphs visualizations consist of complicated overlaying structures. Adding the 3rd dimension can allow you to easily look at the visualization from multiple angles and get a better perspective of the data which can lead to better understanding too. Using hands while communicating is also more natural and helps with more fluid interactions. Finally, the most important point of using Virtual Reality, i.e. the cool factor. There is a general belief in the mass population which still finds virtual reality as a cool futuristic technology but unfeasible for practical use. This application of VR, whilst not being something that can entirely replace the typical graph visualization due to the cost and tediousness associated with VR use, but can be an effective tool in a lot of scenarios. Especially if a company needs to make a point to look futuristic or if someone needs to get their point convinced to multiple people and need high-quality 3d graph visualizations for that.
The team developed a highly modular virtual environment that converts your typical graph visualization into a stereoscopic 3d visualization in virtual reality. This can be interacted upon by multiple team members in a virtual meeting room. Members can join the meeting room using any device compatible with SteamVR which includes most mainstream HMDs. The meeting room consists of a small round table upon which the graph visualization is seated. The members are also seated in such a way that it is easy to interact with each other and also the visualization without requiring much movement from the members. Each member is represented with a virtual avatar, which consists of floating hands and a head. For the graph, the team implemented a very simple visualization to make it versatile enough to handle different datasets. Each node is represented by a colored sphere where the color tells about the type of node, and relationships are denoted by arrowed links whose length is controlled by a force-directed layout. The system uses finger-tracking to support communication and direct and interface interactions. The interface consists of 3 buttons that aid in the analysis of visualization and collaboration.
VR is a cool emerging technology with a lot of innovative interest and coupled with pandemic lead to a spike in VR collaborative tools. One such tool was developed by a German research team that consists of a highly modular virtual environment enabling users to participate in a collaborative meeting to analyze and discuss graph visualization. This article looks at why this environment might be useful to some users and also discusses its implementation.
Full Citation
- Heidrich, D., Meinecke, A., & Schreiber, A. (2021). Towards a Collaborative Experimental Environment for Graph Visualization Research in Virtual Reality.
