Axes and Coordinate Systems Representations for Immersive Analytics of Multi-Dimensional Data

Abstract

Axes are the main components of coordinate systems representations. They play a critical role for the visual analysis of multi-dimensional data. However their representation seems to have always be considered self evident, with oriented lines crossing at an origin, completed with labels such as ticks and names. Such classical representation show limits when it comes 3D visualization and immersive analytic (IA), mainly because orthogonal projection of points on linear axes is hard in a 3d environment, and because the user can move therefore the axes can get out of his field of view. In this paper we propose a task-based definition of axes and coordinate systems representation, as well as a tentative design space for coordinates systems representation in immersion. We also present an exploratory user study we carried out to compare three grid-based representations of coordinate systems for multidimensional data analysis with 3D scatterplots.