Usability study of data visualization in WebVR
Raghu Shivaraman, Troy Finamore · 2017
Virtual reality (VR) is one of the technologies that has slowly and steadily gained popularity in the recent years. Many companies such as Facebook, HTC and Samsung have invested billions of dollars in the production of VR headsets. The analyst team of the multinational finance giant Goldman Sachs predicts that VR/AR technology will have an estimated market value of 80 billion dollars by the year 2025. Most of the applications concerned with virtual reality is related to the entertainment industry. However, some recent works have shown us that VR can be used as an effective tool for data visualization. The main focus of this paper was to evaluate a data visualization tool in WebVR for a multi-dimensional data-set based on the usability and learn-ability of the user experience. This project used the Samsung Galaxy S8 as the visualization device and VR Box along with Bluetooth controller as the equipment for viewing and interaction mechanism. The implementation was majorly carried out by collecting the data-set from an online repository called UCI Machine Learning repository and the system was implemented using WebVR and D3.js. The evaluation consisted of four sections namely: pre-test questionnaire, screen record/ think-aloud technique, post-test questionnaire and emotion card. From the evaluation, the project surmised that smart-phones have the potential to be used as a data visualization platform and it can be further improved upon with future research and additional iterations. Furthermore, this project hopes that it provides information to explore innovative inputs and creating novel UI that enables us to see the changes made to the data in real time.