Page 166 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2021

2021 ITU Kaleidoscope Academic Conference

Tasks like the one described above can be met when the resolution, presence, and freedom of movement as the
appropriate technical measurements are understood and used. criteria for comparison between a CAVE and an HMD-based
We have chosen to use network centrality and opted for four environment. The paper focuses on immersive collaborative
well-known centrality measurements that use only the analysis of network connectivity. Invited subjects are asked
connectivity information provided by the link set. In general, to perform tasks while visualizing a network. The tasks
there is not a great deal of agreement about one of the four consist of counting the number of triangles and finding the
measurements being better than the others to determine what shortest path between given nodes. The task is to be
the most important nodes are. The values provided by those performed in a collaborative manner by two subjects [6].
measurements may not usually determine unequivocally a HMDs were found to allow users to achieve their tasks faster
most important node as their values may lead to conflicts than when the CAVE was used, and there were no notable
whereby one node may have the highest value for one differences in terms of accuracy and communication.
measurement, but a different node may display the highest
value for another. 3. VR/AR AROARO ARCHITECTURE

It is situations like this that lead us to pose that when Our current XR environment, known as Aroaro, began by
analytics cannot unambiguously deliver the grounds for a exploring how a distributed XR, Augmented and Virtual
decision, immersive data visualization can kick in to help. Reality (AR, VR) teaching and learning environment could
The sections below explain how we achieve such goal. be used in a business school. This work then transitioned to
a more specialized focus: data exploration. To this end we
The paper unfolds as follows. In Section 2 we provide some developed a multi-user space where a group of people can,
brief highlights of the literature on immersive analytics. either remotely or co-located, synchronously or
Section 3 presents the system architecture and describes its asynchronously, meet and share information orally or by
functions, giving a brief about the philosophy behind presenting written reports. As Aroaro expanded we
Aroaro’s architecture. Foundations on immersive analytics refocused its purpose on a data visualization platform to
are presented in Section 4 where opportunities afforded are allow users to perform visualization and analysis of data. The
discussed and further pinpointed in the context of network latter aligns with a novel area of research known as
data visualization. The subject of Section 5 is the description immersive analytics [7]. The one purpose of Aroaro’s
of our decision-making case in an immersive network data immersive analytics engine is quality decision-making.
visualization environment, and the reporting of results
obtained from lab experiments with participating subjects. Figure 1 depicts the building blocks and supporting software
Finally, conclusions are presented in Section 6. elements of the Aroaro client.

2. RELATED WORK

An immersive virtual environment allows a user to
experience virtual and augmented reality devices by wearing
a device in such a way that their sight and hearing engage
with a representation of the world that is totally created by
the device’s installed software or an altered view of the real
world. There is already a diverse literature on virtual reality
and augmented reality technologies applied to immersive
environments for visualization. However, literature on
collaborative visual analysis on abstract data in immersive
environments is almost non-existent.

We focus here on developments that have adopted HDMs.
Kwon et al [1], investigating the effectiveness of graph
visualization, report a superior performance of 3D
visualization with an Oculus Rift over 2D graph
visualization. Different authors, investigating collaboration
in information visualization, highlight its importance to data
visualization, in general, and big and complex data, in
particular [2], [3], [4].

Cordeil et al. [5] note the increasing adoption of HMDs due
to their technical advancements, which allow the authors to
carry out a comparison between a centralized automatic Figure 1 – Aroaro’s architecture
virtual environment, or CAVE, and the environment
afforded by an HMD. Their work poses the question of the Aroaro supports peer-to-peer clients with a cloud relay. The
adoption of HMDs focusing on three aspects, namely, system is built using the Unity 3D engine and it contains
within the client an SQLite database for data storage. The

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