CompositingVis: Exploring Interactions for Creating Composite Visualizations in Immersive Environments

TL;DR

This paper addresses how to empower users to create composite visualizations directly within immersive environments, bridging the gap between exploration and authoring. It introduces a design space that ties data relationships to embodied 3D manipulations, enabling five types of composite visualizations (Juxtaposed, Integrated, Superimposed, Overloaded, Nested) through intuitive interactions. The authors validate the space with five VR proof-of-concept cases and a user study (n=16) showing generally high usability and engaging user experience, while highlighting challenges such as unintended view mergers and the need for clearer operational semantics. The work advances immersive analytics by enabling in-situ composition, offering guidance for designers to build flexible, data-aware, and physically expressive visualization tools for analysis and communication.

Abstract

Composite visualization represents a widely embraced design that combines multiple visual representations to create an integrated view. However, the traditional approach of creating composite visualizations in immersive environments typically occurs asynchronously outside of the immersive space and is carried out by experienced experts. In this work, we aim to empower users to participate in the creation of composite visualization within immersive environments through embodied interactions. This could provide a flexible and fluid experience with immersive visualization and has the potential to facilitate understanding of the relationship between visualization views. We begin with developing a design space of embodied interactions to create various types of composite visualizations with the consideration of data relationships. Drawing inspiration from people's natural experience of manipulating physical objects, we design interactions based on the combination of 3D manipulations in immersive environments. Building upon the design space, we present a series of case studies showcasing the interaction to create different kinds of composite visualizations in virtual reality. Subsequently, we conduct a user study to evaluate the usability of the derived interaction techniques and user experience of creating composite visualizations through embodied interactions. We find that empowering users to participate in composite visualizations through embodied interactions enables them to flexibly leverage different visualization views for understanding and communicating the relationships between different views, which underscores the potential of several future application scenarios.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: The constraints of underlying data relationships between different views on creating the five types of composite visualization.
• Figure 2: The design space of embodied compositing visualizations in immersive environments. It mainly introduces the embodied interactions for combining multiple visualization views to form a composite view, considering the constraints of the underlying data relationships.
• Figure 3: Illustration of using the design space for creating five examples of composite views. We first determine data relationships as the input and the composite visualization to be created. Then, we design interactions by combining these 3D manipulations and assign them to different targets.
• Figure 4: Illustration of creating juxtaposed views. (J1) is the scatterplot that can be extended to small multiples by two embodied interactions: using bimanual interaction to extend the x and y axes at the same time in (J1), or using unimanual interaction to extend the y-axis (J2) vertically or the x-axis horizontally (J3). Users can also use both hands to grab and bend the small multiples to a desired curvature (J4).
• Figure 5: Illustration of creating integrated views. Users could grab and put two views in (I1) (i.e., a scatterplot and a bar chart) closely to compose an integrated view (I2). Users could also grab other views to create explicit links by manipulating their relative distance (I3) and adjusting their positions in immersive spaces (I4).