Visualization in the VR-Canvas : How much Reality is Good for Immersive Analytics in Virtual Reality?

Abstract

Building user interfaces in virtual reality (VR) provides many incentives for the desire to replicate the real world within the “VRCanvas”; three-dimensional spaces and objects, movement, direct interaction, realistic lighting, etc. While many of these design decisions might, in fact, support learning and provide a strong sense of familiarity, their benefit for effective analytic tasks remains controversial. Similar to how desktop interfaces adapt and extend metaphors from the real world, there is a widespread assumption that virtual reality environments will benefit from not replicating every part of the real world and instead focus on transcending reality and improving human experience, perception, and, eventually, cognition. In this paper, we collect evidence from studies, opinions, and examples to foster the current discussion on how replicating the real world can improve or impede tasks in immersive analytics. To clarify what we mean by “real world”, we look at a range of aspects including spatiality, physics, multimodality, and visual appearance.