Immersive Analytics

Immersive Space to Think (IST) builds on our prior work on "space to think" and "semantic interaction" with large 2D displays for sensemaking. IST is a novel type of immersive analytics that leverages two key aspects of immersive virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies to support analytic synthesis. First, immersive technologies can provide nearly unlimited 3D space that allows analysts to use space in more expressive and nuanced ways to organize data. Second, because of their diversity of sensors, immersive VR/AR can provide more and richer forms of interaction data for semantic interaction, in which the system observes user actions, makes inferences about user state and intent, and updates underlying data model(s) based on the inferences. The IST approach constitutes a new application of immersive technologies, and it has the potential to transform sensemaking tasks in many domains.