Measuring and Comparing Collaborative Visualization Behaviors in Desktop and Augmented Reality Environments

Augmented reality (AR) provides a significant opportunity to improve collaboration between co-located team members jointly analyzing data visualizations, but existing rigorous studies are lacking. We present a novel method for qualitatively encoding the positions of co-located users collaborating with head-mounted displays (HMDs) to assist in reliably analyzing collaboration styles and behaviors. We then perform a user study on the collaborative behaviors of multiple, co-located synchronously collaborating users in AR to demonstrate this method in practice and contribute to the shortfall of such studies in the existing literature. Pairs of users performed analysis tasks on several data visualizations using both AR and traditional desktop displays. To provide a robust evaluation, we collected several types of data, including software logging of participant positioning, qualitative analysis of video recordings of participant sessions, and pre- and post-study questionnaires including the NASA TLX survey. Our results suggest that the independent viewports of AR headsets reduce the need to verbally communicate about navigating around the visualization and encourage face-to-face and non-verbal communication. Our novel positional encoding method also revealed the overlap of task and communication spaces vary based on the needs of the collaborators.