The benefits of statistical visualization in an immersive environment

We have created an immersive application for statistical graphics and have investigated what benefits it offers over more traditional data analysis tools. We present a description of both the traditional data analysis tools and our virtual environment, and results of an experiment designed to determine if an immersive environment based on the XGobi desktop system provides advantages over XGobi for analysis of high-dimensional statistical data. The experiment included two aspects of each environment: three structure detection (visualization) tasks and one ease of interaction task. The subjects were given these tasks in both the C2 virtual environment and a workstation running XGobi. The experiment results showed an improvement in participants' ability to perform structure detection tasks in the C2 to their performance in the desktop environment. However, participants were more comfortable with the interaction tools in the desktop system.