Engineering Immersive Analytics Applications

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Engineering Immersive Analytics ApplicationsThe long-term goal of the proposed research program is to investigate processes that allow developers to effectively build complex immersive analytics (IA) applications for large multi-dimensional data sets and embed these into other software applications. The program will address the software engineering challenges for immersive analytics applications and develop guidelines and tools that support developers in creating immersive analytics applications. The field of immersive analytics is a relatively new research area and current applications are usually created by experts in immersive technologies as well as analytics techniques. Machine learning and data mining techniques allow to analyze data and detect patterns. Virtual reality approaches allow to place analysis results in virtual spaces while augmented reality techniques display virtual objects in physical real-world locations. Immersive analytics aims at creating multi-dimensional virtual representations of complex data sets and embed them in virtual or physical spaces. By placing analysis results in immersive environments, we can bring humans into decision-making processes and potentially enhancing them by using spatial cognition and proxemic interactions to improve understanding of multi-dimensional data sets. While anecdotally immersive analytics has a high potential, we really do not yet understand for which application scenarios and data characteristics it is improving human decision making. One stream of work in the proposed program will address this question and study empirically for which kind of data sets an immersive environment enhances understanding and task performance. A second stream of work of the proposed program will develop and integrate tools for immersive analytics, providing an open source toolkit for researchers and developers that want to quickly create innovative immersive analytics solutions for their problems. The tools will provide APIs for mapping dimensions to physical dimensions. They also will provide animation capabilities to change the 3D model over time based on a fourth dimension. The third stream of work will investigate engineering processes for building IA applications. Engineering IA applications is an important research area as the fast-growing trend towards big-data analysis is merging with new approaches for immersing data in a real-world context, resulting in a need for engineering approaches for the development of such applications that enable software developers with a general software development background to create IA applications and integrate them with existing tools and processes. The focus on guidelines for IA aimed for big data makes the results of this research effective for various industries.We expect that Canada has substantial receptor capacity to benefit from the proposed program.