Augmented Situated Visualization for Spatial and Context-Aware Decision-Making

Abstract

Whenever accessing indoor spaces such as classrooms or auditoriums, people might attempt to analyze and choose an appropriate place to stay while attending an event. Several criteria may be accounted for, and most are not always self-evident or trivial. This work proposes the use of data visualization allied to an Augmented Reality (AR) user interface to help users defining the most convenient seats to take. We consider sets of arbitrary demands and project information directly atop the seats and all around the room. Users can also narrow down the search by switching and combining the attributes being displayed, e.g., temperature, wheelchair accessibility. The proposed approach was tested against a comparable 2D interactive visualization of the same data in usability assessments of seat-choosing tasks with a set of users (N = 16) to validate the solution. Qualitative and quantitative data indicated that the AR-based solution is promising, suggesting that AR may help users make more accurate decisions, even in an ordinary daily task. Regarding Augmented Situated Visualization, our results open new avenues for the exploration of context-aware data.