SPARVIS: Combining Smartphone and Augmented Reality for Visual Data Analytics

We present SPARVIS, a conceptual framework that combines the strength of both AR and smartphones to enhance visual data analytics. The framework uses AR to display coordinated visualizations and a smartphone to interact with and organize them. This design enables users to take advantage of their surrounding space to externalize and organize their intermediate analysis results in an AR environment and manipulate the visualizations via familiar smartphone interactions. We identify four interactions that are fundamental to visual analytics tasks and propose alternative implementations of these techniques in the SPARVIS framework following existing design guidelines. We run an empirical evaluation to quantitatively test the efficiency and physical demand of two alternative implementations of the "click" mechanism (the most fundamental one among the four) and provide design suggestions based on the study result. We further develop a prototype application based on the framework to illustrate SPARVIS's usage and conduct a user study with 22 participants to validate its usability. Based on the finding, we provide implications for research and design of integrating AR and smartphone for visual data analytics.