Exploring Visualisations for Financial Statements in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Recent developments in Virtual Reality (VR) provide vast opportunities for data visualization. Individuals must be motivated to understand the data presented concerning their personal financial statements, as with better understanding comes more efficient money management and a healthier future-minded focus on planning for their personal finances. This paper aims to investigate how a 3D in VR visualization scenario influences an immersed users’ capability to understand and engage with personal financial statement data in comparison to a scenario where a user would be interacting with 2D personal financial statement data on paper. This was achieved by creating a 2D paper prototype data and utilizing the benefits of 3D in a VR prototype visualization. Both prototypes consisted of chart representations of personal financial statement data, which were tested in a user study. Also, participants (N=23) were given a set of tasks (such as ”Find the quarter in which the least amount of expenses was spent”) to solve by using 2D or 3D financial statements. Results show that participants reported interaction is statistically significant more natural with 2D data on paper than interactions with 3D data in VR. Also, participants reported that they perceived statistically significant more considerable delay between outcome and their action with 3D data in VR. However, effectiveness, measured by the percentage of correctly solved tasks, in both versions enabled participants to answer almost all given tasks successfully. Those results are showing that VR as a medium could be used for analyzing financial statements. In future developments, several additional directions could be incorporated. Exploring data visualization is essential not only for the financial sector but also for other domains such as taxes or law reports.