DXR: A Toolkit for Building Immersive Data Visualizations

Abstract

This paper presents DXR, a toolkit for building immersive data visualizations based on the Unity development platform. Over the past years, immersive data visualizations in augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR) have been emerging as a promising medium for data sense-making beyond the desktop. However, creating immersive visualizations remains challenging, and often require complex low-level programming and tedious manual encoding of data attributes to geometric and visual properties. These can hinder the iterative idea-to-prototype process, especially for developers without experience in 3D graphics, AR, and VR programming. With DXR, developers can efficiently specify visualization designs using a concise declarative visualization grammar inspired by Vega-Lite. DXR further provides a GUI for easy and quick edits and previews of visualization designs in-situ, i.e., while immersed in the virtual world. DXR also provides reusable templates and customizable graphical marks, enabling unique and engaging visualizations. We demonstrate the flexibility of DXR through several examples spanning a wide range of applications.

IATK: An Immersive Analytics Toolkit

“…Most similar to IATK is DxR [47], an authoring toolkit based on Unity. It targets three levels of user expertise (beginner, intermediate, advanced) and the grammar-based approach of Vega-Lite [46].…”

“…It is inspired by existing toolkits and concepts for visualisation on traditional 2D media such as screen and paper (notably Vega-lite [46] and The Grammar of Graphics [53]). Although there are existing immersive visualisation toolkits (DXR [47], VR-viz [45], and Glance [24]), IATK has been designed with a focus on scalability, data visualisation design, and user interaction. Additionally, IATK has emerged from several years of development of visualisation applications [17,31] in collaboration with Monash University, the University of South Australia, ENAC and Edinburgh University.…”

A Systematic Review of Visualization in Building Information Modeling

“…This amounts to more than 150 structured/non-structured and categorical/quantitative data. Many BIM activities could benefit from multidimensional visualization, such as: problem root [72], [161], [162], [163], [164], [165], [166], [167] Various information categories Multidimensional visualization [136], [168], [169], [170] Complex data relationships Graph and network visualization [130], [171], [172], [173] Hierarchical data organization Hierarchical visualization [174], [175], [176] Dynamic processes and activities Temporal visualization [36], [133], [177], [178], [179], [180], [181], [182] Diverse stakeholder perspectives Intelligent user interfaces [183], [184], [185], [186], [187], [188] Digital replica of physical world Virtual and augmented reality [189], [190], [191], [192], [193] cause finding, process optimization, resource allocation, and cost reduction. Graph and network visualization.…”

“…Augmented reality applications range from tracking construction progress to assisting in maintenance works [190], [191]. Emerging research areas such as immersive analytics can also help BIM professionals explore and understand complex datasets [192], [193]. We suggest conducting a more specific literature review about this visualization field in BIM to provide detailed guidance.…”

Live Data Visualization of IoT Sensors Using Augmented Reality (AR) and BIM

“…Kim et al (2017), for instance, developed VisAR system which offers interactivity with static data visualization using Augmented Reality (AR). Sicat et al (2018) [4] developed data visualization applications for extended reality (DXR), a toolkit for immersive visualization of building data based on Unity development platform. Immersive data visualization embedded in DXR system was developed to present data with interactive 2D or 3D visualizations.…”