VRIA - A Framework for Immersive Analytics on the Web

Abstract

UPDATED-March 8, 2019. We report on the design, implementation and evaluation of <VRIA>, a framework for building immersive analytics (IA) solutions in Web-based Virtual Reality (VR), built upon WebVR, A-Frame, React and D3. The recent emergence of affordable VR interfaces have reignited the interest of researchers and developers in exploring new, immersive ways to visualize data. In particular, the use of open-standards web-based technologies for implementing VR in a browser facilitates the ubiquitous and platform-independent adoption of IA systems. Moreover, such technologies work in synergy with established visualization libraries, through the HTML document object model (DOM). We discuss high-level features of <VRIA> and present a preliminary user experience evaluation of one of our use cases.

IATK: An Immersive Analytics Toolkit

“…However, iViz is a commercial platform for immersive visualisation and does not provide programming capabilities nor the range of visualisations possible with IATK. There are two immersive toolkits for the web, VRIA [13] and VR-Viz 8 that use javascript to program a predefined set of visualisations. VR-Vis is based on A-Frame and uses a grammar approach inspired by Vega-lite.…”

VRIA: A Web-Based Framework for Creating Immersive Analytics Experiences

“…The <VRIA> framework described in this paper significantly extends preliminary investigations that discussed early, now superseded, versions of our framework [4], [5], [6], [8]. The current incarnation of <VRIA> presented in this work is suitable for novice and expert users with varied programming and visualization experience, has an updated architecture and capabilities, a new visualization creation workflow and a Web-based building tool.…”

“…<VRIA>'s ultimate goal is to offer a platform upon which investigations on these aspects can be more accessible though the Web, through interoperability with tools assessing such issues. For example, with <VRIA> it is easy to build in-VR questionnaire-based and user-action recording evaluations using simple Web tools, as demonstrated previously [6].…”

“…Regardless of the effort to make <VRIA> as user-friendly as we can perceive, our evidence on the UX associated with using our framework is limited. We have previously evaluated IA experiences, produced with previous versions of <VRIA> in terms of the resulting UX [6]. Students have also used the current <VRIA> version in undergraduate Computer Science final-year projects successfully, for prototyping a variety of IA demonstrations, similar to our use cases.…”

“…Following our early preliminary investigations [4], [5], [6], we were motivated to create a framework that would enable developers of any expertise to create consumable, interactive, immersive data visualizations using standards-based Web technologies. Addressing this challenge, we present our Web-based IA framework, <VRIA>, designed to facilitate the creation of IA experiences in VR (Figure 1), using standards-based Web technologies, and via a visualization creation workflow suitable for developers of all expertise levels.…”