The 3DI group would like to congratulate three of its members for successfully defending their dissertation.
Leo Pavanatto successfully defended his disseration on August 1. The abstract for his disseration follows:
The future of work is rapidly evolving, particularly in knowledge-based professions such as programming, engineering, and scientific research. These fields traditionally rely on physical monitors in office settings. However, with the rise of hybrid work models fueled by technological advances and the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a growing need for flexible and portable display solutions. Workers can now operate from remote settings, their homes, or mobile scenarios while still requiring substantial screen space to complete their tasks. This dissertation investigates the design and evaluation of virtual displays rendered through head-worn displays (HWDs) as a promising alternative, aiming to optimize them for productive work. These displays offer flexibility, allowing users to achieve large monitor spaces in virtual or augmented reality environments, adaptable to any location. We aim to answer three research questions: (1) “How does replacing or extending physical monitors with virtual displays using current technology impact the user experience of productivity tasks?”, (2) “How can we take advantage of the spatial flexibility property of virtual displays to eliminate screen boundaries and increase the amount of space available to users?”, and (3) “How can we leverage properties of virtual displays to design techniques that minimize overhead in window management tasks without reducing user freedom?” Through careful interface design and empirical user studies, we seek to understand how to leverage the unique capabilities of HWDs to enhance productivity, preparing the groundwork for future virtual display systems as technology advances.
Kylie Davidson succesfully defended her disseration on August 6. The abstract for her disseration follows:
Sensemaking is the way in which we understand the world around us. Pirolli and Card developed a sensemaking model related to intelligence analysis, which involves taking raw, unstructured data, analyzing it, and presenting a report of the findings. With lower-cost immersive technologies becoming more popular, new opportunities exist to leverage embod- ied and distributed cognition to better support sensemaking by providing vast, immersive space for creating meaningful schemas (organizational structures) during an analysis task. This work builds on prior work in immersive analytics on the concept of Immersive Space to Think (IST), which provides analysts with immersive space to physically navigate and use to organize information during a sensemaking task. In this work, we performed several studies that aimed to understand how IST supports sensemaking and how we can develop additional features to better aid analysts while they complete sensemaking in immersive an- alytics systems, focusing on non-quantitative data analysis. In a series of exploratory user studies, we aimed to understand how users’ sensemaking process evolves during multiple ses- sion analyses, which identified how the participants refined their use of the immersive space into later stages of the sensemaking process. Another exploratory user study highlighted how professional analysts and novice users share many similarities in immersive analytic tool us- age during sensemaking within IST. In addition to looking at multi-session analysis tasks, we also explored how sensemaking strategies change as users become more familiar with the immersive analytics tool usage in an exploratory study that utilized multiple analysis tasks completed over a series of three user study sessions. Lastly, we conducted a comparative user study to evaluate how the addition of new organizational features, clustering, and linking affect sensemaking within IST. Overall, our studies expanded the IST tool set and gathered an enhanced understanding of how immersive space is utilized during analysis tasks within IST.
Shakiba Davari successfully defended her dissertation on August 9. The abstract for her disseration follows:
Augmented Reality (AR) transforms the entire 3D space around the user into a dynamic screen, surpassing the limitations of traditional displays and enabling efficient access to multiple pieces of information simultaneously, all day, every day. Recent developments in AR eyeglasses promise that AR could become the next generation of personal computing devices. To realize this vision of pervasive AR, the AR interface must address the challenges posed by constant and omnipresent virtual content. As the user’s context changes, the virtual content in AR head-worn displays can occasionally become obtrusive, hindering the user’s perception and awareness of their surroundings and their interaction with both the virtual and physical worlds. An intelligent interface is needed to adapt the presentation and interaction of AR content. This dissertation outlines a roadmap towards effective, efficient, and unobtrusive AR through intelligent AR (iAR) systems that automatically learn and adapt the interface to the user’s context. To achieve this goal, we: (1) Design multiple context-aware AR interfaces and explore their design and effectiveness in various contexts through four experiments; (2) Propose a design space for XR interfaces; (3) Provide a taxonomy of quantifiable contextual components; (4) Propose a framework and architecture for designing iAR interfaces.
Congratulations Dr. Pavanatto, Dr. Davidson, and Dr. Davari!