Human Factors in Immersive Analytics

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of immersive analytics, emphasizing the importance of human factors, ergonomic techniques, and validation protocols to enhance system acceptance and effectiveness.

Contribution

It highlights the need for standardized human-centric evaluation methods and discusses new approaches to improve ergonomic design in immersive analytics.

Findings

Lack of ergonomic techniques hinders system adoption

Need for standardized validation protocols

Human factors critically influence immersive analytics design

Abstract

It has been ten years since the term ''Immersive Analytics'' (IA) was coined and research interest in the topic remains strong. Researchers in this field have produced practical and conceptual knowledge concerning the use of emerging immersive spatial display and interaction technologies for sense-making tasks through a number of papers, surveys, and books. However, a lack of truly physically and psychologically ergonomic techniques, as well as standardized human-centric validation protocols for these, remains a significant barrier to wider acceptance of practical IA systems in ubiquitous applications. Building upon a series of workshops on immersive analytics at various conferences, this workshop aims to explore new approaches and establish standard practices for evaluating immersive analytics systems from a human factors perspective. We will gather immersive analytics researchers and practitioners to look closely at these human factors -- including cognitive and physical functions as well as behaviour and performance -- to see how they inform the design and deployment of immersive analytics techniques and applications and to inform future research.