XROps: A Visual Workflow Management System for Dynamic Immersive Analytics

TL;DR

XROps is a web-based visual programming tool that simplifies creating immersive analytics applications, enabling real-time data visualization and adaptation without coding, thus lowering technical barriers for domain experts.

Contribution

The paper introduces XROps, a novel interactive visual programming system that facilitates dynamic immersive analytics development without scripting, supporting real-time sensor data integration.

Findings

XROps is user-friendly and effective for creating immersive analytics applications.

Users can modify visualizations on-the-fly with immediate feedback.

The system successfully integrates real-time sensor data from XR devices.

Abstract

Immersive analytics is gaining attention across multiple domains due to its capability to facilitate intuitive data analysis in expansive environments through user interaction with data. However, creating immersive analytics systems for specific tasks is challenging due to the need for programming expertise and significant development effort. Despite the introduction of various immersive visualization authoring toolkits, domain experts still face hurdles in adopting immersive analytics into their workflow, particularly when faced with dynamically changing tasks and data in real time. To lower such technical barriers, we introduce XROps, a web-based authoring system that allows users to create immersive analytics applications through interactive visual programming, without the need for low-level scripting or coding. XROps enables dynamic immersive analytics authoring by allowing users to modify each step of the data visualization process with immediate feedback, enabling them to build visualizations on-the-fly and adapt to changing environments. It also supports the integration and visualization of real-time sensor data from XR devices, a key feature of immersive analytics, facilitating the creation of various analysis scenarios. We evaluated the usability of XROps through a user study and demonstrate its efficacy and usefulness in several example scenarios. We have released a web platform (https://vience.io/xrops) to demonstrate various examples to supplement our findings.