Exploring Spatial Hybrid User Interface for Visual Sensemaking

TL;DR

This paper presents a spatial hybrid system combining PC and VR for visual sensemaking, improving user experience and performance by leveraging the strengths of both environments.

Contribution

It introduces a novel PC+VR hybrid system that enables seamless switching, addressing limitations of each environment and enhancing data visualization capabilities.

Findings

Hybrid system outperforms VR-only in user preference.

Switching between PC and VR does not impair performance.

System effectively combines benefits of both PC and VR environments.

Abstract

We built a spatial hybrid system that combines a personal computer (PC) and virtual reality (VR) for visual sensemaking, addressing limitations in both environments. Although VR offers immense potential for interactive data visualization (e.g., large display space and spatial navigation), it can also present challenges such as imprecise interactions and user fatigue. At the same time, a PC offers precise and familiar interactions but has limited display space and interaction modality. Therefore, we iteratively designed a spatial hybrid system (PC+VR) to complement these two environments by enabling seamless switching between PC and VR environments. To evaluate the system's effectiveness and user experience, we compared it to using a single computing environment (i.e., PC-only and VR-only). Our study results (N=18) showed that spatial PC+VR could combine the benefits of both devices to outperform user preference for VR-only without a negative impact on performance from device switching overhead. Finally, we discussed future design implications.