An Evaluation of Immersive Infographics for News Reporting: Quantifying the Effect of Mobile AR Concrete Scales Infographics on Volume Understanding

TL;DR

The paper evaluates immersive concrete-scales infographics built on mobile AR to improve readers' understanding of volumetric information in news articles. It uses a within-subjects design comparing text, static image infographics, and mobile AR infographics across three news topics (Trash, Water, Money) and measures both volume estimation accuracy and infographic-induced affect. Results show that AR reduces estimation errors relative to both text and image, with the strongest gains in the Trash scenario, and that both image and AR improve understanding over text, albeit with AR incurring longer task times and enabling richer exploration. The findings support deploying AR-based immersive infographics in journalism to convey scale more effectively, while noting limitations related to environment, device, and counterbalancing, and outlining avenues for broader validation and design optimization.

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) allows us to represent information in the user's own environment and, therefore, convey a visceral feeling of its true physical scale. Journalists increasingly leverage this opportunity through immersive infographics, an extension of conventional infographics reliant on familiar references to convey volumes, heights, weights, and sizes. Our goal is to measure the contribution of immersive mobile AR concrete scales infographics to the user's understanding of the information scale. We focus on infographics powered by tablet-based mobile AR, given its current much more widespread use for news consumption compared to headset-based AR. We designed and implemented a study apparatus containing three alternative representation methods (textual analogies, image infographic, and AR infographic) for three different pieces of news with different characteristics and scales. In a controlled user study, we asked 26 participants to represent the expected volume of the information in the real world with the help of an AR mobile application. We also compared their subjective feelings when interacting with the different representations. While both image and AR infographics led to significantly better comprehension than textual analogies alone across different kinds of news, AR infographics led, on average, to a 31.8% smaller volume estimation error than static ones. Our findings indicate that mobile AR concrete scales infographics can contribute to news reporting by increasing readers' abilities to comprehend volume information.

Figures (13)

• Figure 1: Mobile news apps, widely used for news consumption, can leverage Augmented Reality to contextualize volume information in news articles in relation to the reader's real environment. This can potentially improve understanding of information on waste production, water use, and amounts of money, as we have proposed. Our goal is to compare the user's comprehension of volumes expressed in AR against two more conventional approaches: textual analogies and static images of concrete scales infographics.
• Figure 2: The static infographics we generated for our three selected pieces of news employ familiar objects (50-liter trash bags, 20-liter water gallons, and R$100 banknotes) to convey the information size. Following common practices in journalistic infographics, they include a 1.7m human representation to further contextualize the information size.
• Figure 3: The immersive concrete scales infographics we generated employ the same familiar objects used for the static infographics (\ref{['fig:Prototypes']}). However, they are rendered in 1:1 scale in the user's real environment for exploration through our tablet-based mobile AR application. Note: while text contrast appears low in the screen captures, the participants considered it easily readable in our experiment.
• Figure 4: As an example of the study workflow, a participant in Group A performs the tasks from the Trash scenario after the Training in the following order: (1) the user is presented with the Text format, then draws the prism in AR to estimate the volume reported in the text; (2) the user is presented with the static infographic as an Image and then draws the prism in AR to estimate the volume reported in the static infographic; (3) the user is presented with the immersive infographic in mobile AR, can walk around the infographic, and then draws the prism to estimate the volume reported in the AR infographic. \ref{['tab:tasks_order']} details the counterbalanced condition orderings for all groups.
• Figure 5: We separated the participants into six groups, each one doing the tasks in a different order to balance our user study. We deliberately always showed the Text format first in order to capture the participant's original assessment prior to receiving any visual indications through infographics, thus serving mostly as a baseline result for the two visual conditions.