Building Multiple Coordinated Spaces for Effective Immersive Analytics through Distributed Cognition

Abstract

Multiple Coordinated Views (MCV) has been widely used in visualization. This work explores Multiple Coordinated Spaces (MCS), a 3D version of MCV, in order to integrate various 2D displays in a large physical environment as a unified analysis workspace. Built upon the rich background of distributed and embodied cognition, MCS supports interactive analysis in a connected, distributed set of subspaces. For MCS, we have developed visualization and interactive techniques for coordinating augmented reality devices together with classical WIMP GUIs systems. We also demonstrate the usages of MCS using a multivariate, geo-spatial biodiversity application. The major advantage of MCS is a flexible coordination framework for creating new immersive analytics methods by mixing visualizations from different devices, and mixing physical and virtual operations from different environments.