Augmenting Static Visualizations with PapARVis Designer

TL;DR

This paper introduces PapARVis Designer, an integrated environment for creating augmented reality enhancements for static visualizations, streamlining design, preview, and debugging processes.

Contribution

It presents a novel authoring environment that seamlessly combines static visualization design with AR augmentation, addressing tool fragmentation and enabling simultaneous design and debugging.

Findings

High user satisfaction with the environment

Participants can create augmented visualizations in under 5 minutes

Demonstrates expressiveness through diverse real-world examples

Abstract

This paper presents an authoring environment for augmenting static visualizations with virtual content in augmented reality. Augmenting static visualizations can leverage the best of both physical and digital worlds, but its creation currently involves different tools and devices, without any means to explicitly design and debug both static and virtual content simultaneously. To address these issues, we design an environment that seamlessly integrates all steps of a design and deployment workflow through its main features: i) an extension to Vega, ii) a preview, and iii) debug hints that facilitate valid combinations of static and augmented content. We inform our design through a design space with four ways to augment static visualizations. We demonstrate the expressiveness of our tool through examples, including books, posters, projections, wall-sized visualizations. A user study shows high user satisfaction of our environment and confirms that participants can create augmented visualizations in an average of 4.63 minutes.