Retrofitting Realities: Affordances and Limitations in Porting an Interactive Geospatial Visualization from Augmented to Virtual Reality

Abstract

As Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) applications become more mainstream, developers now have a number of design decisions that must be carefully considered before choosing a device for an interactive visualization with big data. Unfortunately, understanding the true affordances and limitations of each device, and how these affect the resultant potential to support visual analytics, is still more of a black art than a science. In this paper, we highlight key design decisions and technical challenges in the context of a case study to port an interactive geospatial visualization from an AR device, the Microsoft Hololens, to a mobile VR device, the Google Daydream. Our results show that careful leveraging of backend cloud services can allow for interactive visualizations of big data to scale well across devices.