Make Interaction Situated: Designing User Acceptable Interaction for Situated Visualization in Public Environments

TL;DR

This work addresses the challenge of making situated visualization in public environments socially acceptable and practically usable. It combines a formative study, iterative design exploring eye-, hand-, and spatially-based interactions, and an AR prototype evaluated in real-world-like public scenarios, showing that multimodal, subtle interactions are preferred over conventional hand-based methods. The study provides design recommendations on data triggering, overview/detail interactions, and the role of environmental context, ultimately demonstrating improved user acceptance and perceived usefulness in public settings. The findings advance the deployment of situated analytics by aligning interaction design with social context, task needs, and device limitations, enabling more usable in-situ data reasoning in everyday environments.

Abstract

Situated visualization blends data into the real world to fulfill individuals' contextual information needs. However, interacting with situated visualization in public environments faces challenges posed by user acceptance and contextual constraints. To explore appropriate interaction design, we first conduct a formative study to identify user needs for data and interaction. Informed by the findings, we summarize appropriate interaction modalities with eye-based, hand-based and spatially-aware object interaction for situated visualization in public environments. Then, through an iterative design process with six users, we explore and implement interactive techniques for activating and analyzing with situated visualization. To assess the effectiveness and acceptance of these interactions, we integrate them into an AR prototype and conduct a within-subjects study in public scenarios using conventional hand-only interactions as the baseline. The results show that participants preferred our prototype over the baseline, attributing their preference to the interactions being more acceptable, flexible, and practical in public.

Figures (13)

• Figure 1: The four interaction themes for situated visualization from users' perspective, derived from the unified Reality-Based Interaction (RBI) framework jacob2008reality. As users' awareness and understanding of the surrounding context gradually broaden, their adoption of the interactions with situated visualization can be more aligned with the real-world environment.
• Figure 2: The study comprises three main steps: 1) participants performed the routine tasks, 2) we conducted an interview to collect their activities and requirements, 3) they demonstrated and the detailed requirements of interaction and data display.
• Figure 3: Summary of user requirements for situated visualization and interaction. Activities, tasks, and data visualizations align with previous works lin2022questlin2021labeling, with unique findings about view situatedness, data triggers, and interaction inputs.
• Figure 4: The framework for interaction design exploration within the chosen scenarios. In (A), we present interaction input modalities for selected public scenarios and the required data views in (B), informed by the formative study. We summarize the required tasks with situated visualization, detailed in (C), identified through iterative design.
• Figure 5: The iterative design process with four steps that alternate between the implementation and design sessions. Based on the formative study's findings, we implemented the initial data triggering interaction with situated visualization (Step 1). Then, we conducted two rounds (Step 2-4) of design study with the participants to explore, evaluate, and improve the interaction.