Hello! My name is Wolfgang Büschel and today I am going to talk about our work on MIRIA:
A mixed reality toolkit for the in-situ visualization and analysis of spatio-temporal interaction data.
This paper is joint work with my colleagues Anke Lehmann & Raimund Dachselt ...
... at the Interactive Media Lab at Technische Universität Dresden.
With the recent advances in mixed reality technologies and new paradigms such as immersive analytics, ...
... the question of how to analyze user interaction in these systems becomes important.
In fact, evaluation of such systems is one of the grand challenges of IA as described in another CHI paper this year.
Consequently, with MIRIA, we support HCI research in mixed reality by providing tools for the visual analysis ...
... of typical study data, such as movements of users or tracked devices, ...
... interaction events, ...
... and videos.
The core of our concept is to enable the co-located analysis by multiple users, directly in the original environment.
On one hand, by placing the data in 3D space, ...
... we support the user in building a mental model of the data and allow for physical navigation.
On the other hand, the impact of the physical environment on the interaction can be analyzed easily.
This could, for example, include distances to physical objects, ...
... areas of interaction, ...
... tracking problems and many more.
In MIRIA, we provide 3D trajectories of logged tracking time series.
Virtual 3D objects indicate the position and orientation of the tracked users or devices.
2D view containers can be placed freely and show visualizations such as heatmaps or scatterplots.
These 2D views can be freely combined and may also show videos or screenshots as additional context.
They can even be attached to virtual or even physical objects.
Our prototype runs completely on Microsoft's HoloLens 2, so no further instrumentation is needed.
After loading the data, the analyst can simply align the virtual content to the real environment ...
... by setting the scene's origin.
Situated 2D panels provide info about the study data and allow users to switch between sessions or conditions.
A playback panel can be used to navigate through the time-series and start or stop automatic playback.
We also support time-based filtering of the data.
The playback panel can also show events on a timeline.
The current implementation of MIRIA supports several types of visualizations.
Most importantly, we support 3D trajectories showing the movement of one or more tracked objects or users over time.
Instead of a user-defined object color, they can also be configured to show speed.
In addition, we also provide a 3D trail view, which shows only part of the trajectories and helps to reduce visual clutter.
We also support a range of 2D views that can be placed arbitrarily by the user.
As mentioned before, this includes scatterplots and heatmaps.
In this example, we show an application screenshot as additional context ...
... directly at the position of a wall display.
This is shown here in combination with scatterplots that visualize touch events on the wall.
In general, all of our 2D views can be combined like this, and they can even be attached to dynamic objects.
To demonstrate the usefulness of the MIRIA concept and application, ...
... we collected expert feedback in multiple hands-on sessions with data from real, existing user studies.
Our first example was a study comparing touch input and the use of spatial interaction for the exploration of 3D data.
As can be seen here, the touch condition showed much higher camera speeds in large circles around the data, ...
... compared to the more dense, localized camera paths during spatial interaction.
The second example study investigated user movements in a four player game on a large, interactive display wall,...
... looking into movements of users, their inter-personal distances, and so on.
With MIRIA, it is possible to analyze the user interaction in such systems in-situ, ...
... augmenting the application or video footage thereof with spatial interaction data ...
... and keeping the rich contextual clues from the real physical environment.
This concludes my talk. Thank you for your attention, and for further details, ...
... please refer to our paper or our project website at imld.de/miria, ...
... where you can find additional material and the source code repository.