There Is No Spoon

Discovering the pros and cons of immersive analytics.

Image from The Matrix (1999).

Virtual Reality is one of those emerging technologies that has been touted to have tremendous potential advantages for applications such as education, healthcare, employee training, and of course the game industry. But did you ever think that you could put on a VR headset and open your Robinhood app to see how your investments were performing? What about grabbing your stock portfolio with your VR controller and seeing how it has changed over the long term?

In a IEEE VIS 2019 paper, a team of researchers from the United States and Australia set out to find whether the use of immersive analytics in VR could be used to perform economic analysis. The team broke down their study into three phases:

1. Design Stage: Understanding economic analysis and improving an existing immersive analytics system called ImAxes;
2. Deployment Stage: Installing the prototype “in the wild” in a communal space in a U.S. federal workplace for economic analysis;
3. Mixed Methods Study Stage: Evaluating the prototype with professional economic analysts exploring their own datasets.

Why even perform economic analysis in VR in the first place? The primary benefits of immersive environments include the free 3D space itself as well as factors such as presence, immersion, and embodiment. Space makes it easy for the analyst to organize and visualize data in a more spatially efficient way. Presence is the experience of being in a virtual environment; immersion is the technology that enables such presence; and embodiment is the sensation of possessing a body in such an environment.

The study involved setting up the VR equipment in a U.S. federal agency for economic analysis. Data collected using this deployment included user inputs, spatial activity, and participation interactions. During the initial ”in the wild” study, participants played around with ImAxes on their own time. In the formal user study, the research team asked analysts to first analyze their own data using ImAxes, and then present their findings. Finally, they were interviewed about their experience.

There were four main findings from the study that I find the most interesting:

1. Most participants did not utilize the full 3D space. Instead they remained in one spot creating visualizations around them, maintaining only one or two visualizations at a time.
2. Participants found this process of visualizing more engaging and fun than the traditional way.
3. Participants were not affected by the lack of precision of VR wand controllers and were able to understand the use of ImAxes properly, and often referred to the process of creating such visualizations as “whiteboarding”.
4. Participants were not affected by fatigue which often comes with using VR headsets for a long time.

Immersive analytics is here to stay, but has a ways to go before it is usable by anyone. Current immersive technology have many issues, such as interaction, usability, accessibility and security. We need to have these considerations in mind when introducing these technologies in new applications.

References

• Andrea Batch, Andrew Cunningham, Maxime Cordeil, Niklas Elmqvist, Tim Dwyer, Bruce H. Thomas, Kim Marriott. There Is No Spoon: Evaluating Performance, Space Use, and Presence with Expert Domain Users in Immersive Analytics. IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, 2019.