Improving Collaboration and Mobility of Immersive Analytics Authoring Toolkits Completed

ANID – FONDECYT Iniciación · Research

Funding
ANID – FONDECYT Iniciación
Project
N°11230349
Duration
March 2023 – March 2026
Budget
~$130K USD
Role
Principal Investigator

Team

Description

This project addresses a fundamental challenge in the adoption of immersive analytics: the gap between the physical environments where analysts need to work and the tools available for creating data visualizations in extended reality (XR). Existing authoring toolkits for augmented and virtual reality largely require desktop-bound workflows disconnected from the real-world spaces where visualizations are ultimately consumed. The project investigates how authoring tools can be redesigned to support in-situ authoring—allowing analysts to create and refine visualizations directly in the physical or virtual spaces where they will be used.

A second thrust addresses multi-user collaboration during the authoring process itself. The project designs and evaluates novel interaction mechanisms—including real-time physiological sensing and avatar-based emotional state visualization—that allow multiple users to collaborate within a shared immersive environment while co-constructing analytical artifacts.

Results

Emotional State Sharing in Collaborative Immersive Authoring

The project delivered Emotions Mapper, an end-to-end EEG-to-visualization pipeline that captures brain signals via a wearable Muse 2 headband, classifies them in real time into emotional proxies (joy, concentration, activation, calm), and broadcasts the resulting states to a shared immersive environment. States are rendered as visual cues attached to collaborators' avatars (Fig. 1), enabling participants to perceive emotional context while performing joint visualization authoring tasks.

Avatar displaying emotional state cues in the VR configuration interface

Fig. 1a. Avatar displaying emotional state cues alongside the in-VR configuration interface, where users personalize visualization parameters such as cue size and update frequency.

Overview of the collaborative immersive analytics environment

Fig. 1b. Overview of the collaborative immersive analytics scene with multiple authoring spaces, where participants jointly build and explore data visualizations.

Usability evaluation with 8 participants yielded an average System Usability Scale (SUS) score of 73.75, confirming that real-time emotional visualization can be integrated into immersive authoring workflows. A dedicated experimental protocol was designed to measure the collaborative impact of cognitive-state sharing, comparing scenarios with and without shared affective cues during authoring sessions.

Mobile Authoring with the Body-Supported Keyboard

To free analysts from fixed workstations, the project designed the Body-Supported Keyboard (BSK): a wearable ergonomic support that integrates a Bluetooth keyboard into a 3D-printed body harness, enabling sustained text-based authoring in augmented reality while moving freely (Fig. 2). The system was integrated into the AVAR immersive analytics authoring toolkit, allowing users to construct and modify visualizations while standing, kneeling, walking, or adopting other postures in situ.

Body-Supported Keyboard prototype showing different user postures during an AR authoring session

Fig. 2. The Body-Supported Keyboard (BSK) prototype. Left: full wearable configuration combining a HoloLens 2 headset with a Bluetooth keyboard on a 3D-printed body harness. Right: participants adopting different postures — sitting, lying down, kneeling — during an immersive authoring session, demonstrating the mobility enabled by the BSK.

A controlled within-subjects study with 20 participants compared mobile BSK authoring against a conventional standing-desk configuration. Results show task completion times and typing accuracy comparable to stationary setups, while mobility metrics confirmed significantly greater posture diversity in the wearable condition. The mean SUS score was 74.5, indicating good usability and positive acceptance. The AVAR authoring toolkit developed in this project is publicly available.

Publications

Keywords