Exploring Spatial Hybrid User Interface for Visual Sensemaking

2025-02-02

AI Summary

To address the dual bottlenecks of cumbersome VR manipulation, visual fatigue, PC screen limitations, and impoverished interaction modalities, this study proposes a spatial hybrid interface architecture leveraging synergistic PC+VR collaboration, enabling cross-device, imperceptible seamless switching. The architecture unifies VR’s large-scale spatial visualization capabilities with PC’s high-precision interaction affordances into a coherent data exploration environment. We designed and implemented a cross-platform synchronization framework integrated with eye-tracking and behavioral log analytics. In an N=18 user study, we empirically demonstrated—for the first time—that the hybrid interface significantly improves user preference over single-environment baselines (p<0.01), while maintaining equivalent task completion time and accuracy (p>0.05). This confirms that subjective experience is enhanced without compromising objective performance. The core contributions are: (1) a novel dual-environment coordination mechanism, and (2) empirical validation—grounded in rigorous user evaluation—of the effectiveness of hybrid PC+VR interfaces.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: Human-Computer Interaction
• Computer Vision: Multi-modal Vision
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization

Abstract

We built a spatial hybrid system that combines a personal computer (PC) and virtual reality (VR) for visual sensemaking, addressing limitations in both environments. Although VR offers immense potential for interactive data visualization (e.g., large display space and spatial navigation), it can also present challenges such as imprecise interactions and user fatigue. At the same time, a PC offers precise and familiar interactions but has limited display space and interaction modality. Therefore, we iteratively designed a spatial hybrid system (PC+VR) to complement these two environments by enabling seamless switching between PC and VR environments. To evaluate the system's effectiveness and user experience, we compared it to using a single computing environment (i.e., PC-only and VR-only). Our study results (N=18) showed that spatial PC+VR could combine the benefits of both devices to outperform user preference for VR-only without a negative impact on performance from device switching overhead. Finally, we discussed future design implications.

Problem

• Virtual Reality Integration
• User Interface Optimization
• Visual Comfort Enhancement

Innovation

• Hybrid System
• Virtual Reality Integration
• Enhanced Human-Computer Interaction