Abstract
Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) have established themselves as technologies which allow for new interaction and visualisation possibilities in a natural andfamiliar way. It is therefore not surprising that the interest of research into this technology is big. Data analytics is a field which can reap huge benefits by utilising these
new technologies in terms of visualisations of not only typically desktop centric 2D data
representation but also truely 3D visualisations with the added benefit of naturally inspect this data. Interaction possibilities however are rather lacking and are mostly only
designed as a stopgap from the typical 2D interaction techniques into the 3D realm.
These techniques are first and foremost designed to interact with 2D representations of
data and can cause problems like bad precision, confusing gestures or appearances of
fatigue like the gorilla arm effect.
Further, the topic of collaboration has to be properly explored as well. Most projects
place multiple users in the same environment, meaning they don’t mix realities between
users, but rather put every user in the same reality. A proper AR setup requires a lot
of space and an upfront investment, which not everybody can afford, making it hard to
allow for collaborative work inside such an AR environment.
Researchers like Mayer [May22] try to tackle the problem of interaction in 3D space
by designing and implementing a which utilises a spatially aware tablet for interaction
purposes. Based upon this prior work, a new prototype is developed with the added
collaborative properties to allow for multiple users to collaborate on the same data but
utilising different devices. The focus hereby lies on the collaborative aspect and how
users in different environments can collaborate on a data analysis task.
Firstly, related projects in the context of cross-device collaboration are researched and
presented. The focus hereby lies on the way they use these different devices and how
they utilise a mix of realities, based on the definition by Milgram et al. [Mil+94], to
provide data visualisation and interaction. The knowledge gathered is used to create a
design of an AR prototype which allows for the simultaneous viewing and manipulation of data with a secondary user utilising the open_iA software [Frö+19]. The design
of the AR application mainly follows the groundwork by Mayer [May22]. Meaning the
data manipulation capabilities defined by Mayer [May22] are used as the basic building
blocks for not only data manipulation but also data creation.
| Date of Award | 2024 |
|---|---|
| Original language | English (American) |
| Supervisor | Christoph Anthes (Supervisor) |