Generative AI for Visualization: Opportunities and Challenges.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have led to the creation of powerful generative AI methods and tools capable of producing text, code, images, and other media in response to user prompts. Significant interest in the technology has led to speculation about what fields, including visualization, can be augmented or replaced by such approaches. However, there remains a lack of understanding about which visualization activities may be particularly suitable for the application of generative AI. Drawing on examples from the field, we map current and emerging capabilities of generative AI across the different phases of the visualization lifecycle and describe salient opportunities and challenges.

The Curse of Performative User Studies.

Computer graphics research frequently evaluates research outputs with user studies, often through online crowdworking platforms. When performed carefully and thoughtfully, studies on human behavior and preferences provide valuable insights, useful for both developing and evaluating new tools. Yet, I argue that many of the current studies are performative: they result from reviewers' expectation that "papers should have some evaluation," not from careful thought about the value and usefulness of the studies themselves. These casually done studies are often uninformative or misleading, while putting undue burden on authors and reviewers. The expectation of positive user evaluation results can also inhibit creative new work. I call for reviewers to be more thoughtful about asking for user studies, for authors to be more thoughtful when they perform studies, and for our field to conduct new research and create new guidelines on when and how user studies are genuinely useful.

How to Evaluate If Collaborative Augmented Reality Speaks to Its Users.

Augmented reality (AR) is increasingly considered to support scenarios of co-located and remote collaboration. Thus far, the core goal has been advancing the supporting technologies and assessing how they perform to inform design and development, thus providing support toward their maturity. Nevertheless, while understanding the performance and impact of supporting technology is indisputable groundwork, we argue that the field needs to adopt a framework that moves from answering questions about the proposed methods and technologies to a more holistic view, also encompassing collaboration. However, moving toward this goal challenges how evaluations are designed, adding complexity and raising several questions about what needs to be considered. In this article, we briefly examine the different dimensions entailed in collaborative AR and argue in favor of a distinctive evaluation framework that goes beyond current practice and sets its eyes on the elements that allow judging how collaboration unfolds while informing the role of the supporting technology.

Toward a Holistic Virtual Environment for Graph Visualization and Analysis.

Interactive data visualization plays a crucial role in the interpretability of large datasets. Virtual reality offers unique advantages in exploring data, beyond traditional 2-D views. This article presents a set of interaction artifacts designed for analyzing and interpreting complex datasets through immersive 3-D graph visualization and interaction. Our system makes complex datasets easier to work with by offering a wide range of visual customization tools and intuitive methods for selection, manipulation, and filtering. It also provides a cross-platform, collaborative environment that can be accessed by remote users through traditional computers, drawing tablets, and touchscreen devices.

Notebooks for Data Analysis and Visualization: Moving Beyond the Data.

Notebooks are a relatively new way of analyzing data and creating visualizations. They differ from the common graphical user interfaces used for visualization tools in many ways, and have their own strengths and weaknesses. In particular, they allow easy sharing, experimentation, and collaboration, and provide context about the data for different kinds of users. They also integrate modeling, forecasting, and complex analyses directly with the visualization. We believe that notebooks provide a unique and fundamentally new way of working with and understanding data. By laying out their unique properties, we hope to inspire both researchers and practitioners to investigate their many uses, explore their pros and cons, and share their findings.

Can Image Data Facilitate Reproducibility of Graphics and Visualizations? Toward a Trusted Scientific Practice.

Reproducibility is a cornerstone of good scientific practice; however, the ongoing "reproducibility crisis" shows that we still need to improve the way we are doing research currently. Reproducibility is crucial because it enables both the comparison to existing techniques as well as the composition and improvement of existing approaches. It can also increase trust in the respective results, which is paramount for adoption in further research and applications. While there are already many initiatives and approaches with different complexity aimed at enabling reproducible research in the context of visualization, we argue for an alternative, lightweight approach that documents the most relevant parameters with minimal overhead. It still complements complex approaches well, and integration with any existing tool or system is simple. Our approach uses the images produced by visualizations and seamlessly piggy-backs everyday communication and research collaborations, publication authoring, public outreach, and internal note-taking. We exemplify how our approach supports day-to-day work and discuss limitations and how they can be countered.

Design of a sensor network for the quantitative analysis of sport climbing.

We describe the design of a modular sensorized climbing wall for motion analysis in a naturalistic environment. The wall is equipped with force sensors to measure interaction forces between the athlete and the wall, which can be used by experienced instructors, athletes, or therapists, to gain insights into the quality of motion. A specifically designed triaxial load cell is integrated into each hold placement, invisible to the climber, and compatible with standard climbing holds. Data collected through the sensors is sent to an app running on a portable device. The wall can be adapted to different uses. To validate our design, we recorded a repeated climbing activity of eleven climbers with varying degrees of expertise. Analysis of the interaction forces during the exercise demonstrates that the sensor network design can provide valuable information to track and analyze exercise performance changes over time. Here we report the design process as well as the validation and testing of the sensorized climbing wall.

An Exploratory Study on the Effect of Virtual Environments on Cognitive Performances and Psychophysiological Responses.

Research shows that reduced exposure to natural contexts is associated with an increase in psychophysical disorders. Recent evidence suggests that even a brief experience in natural scenarios can positively affect people's health and well-being. However, natural contexts are not always easily accessible. This study investigates the effects of natural and indoor virtual environments (VREs) on psychophysiological and cognitive responses. Following a within-subject design, 34 healthy participants were exposed to two VREs (i.e., a forest and a living room) in a counterbalanced order through a head-mounted display (Oculus Rift). Participants were asked to explore the scenarios and execute a modified version of the Paced Auditory Serial Addition Test. Physiological parameters (heart rate, skin conductance level [SCL], and respiration rate) were recorded during the whole session. After the exposure to VREs, participants filled a set of visual analog scales to rate their subjective experience of presence, relaxation, and stress. Participants reported a higher perceived sense of relaxation in the virtual forest. Moreover, their SCLs were significantly higher in this environment, showing that the forest elicited higher physiological arousal than the living room. Furthermore, their SCLs were significantly higher during the attentional task in the virtual living room. The results suggest that a natural virtual environment can make people feel more relaxed and physiologically engaged than an indoor scenario. The latter instead can be linked to a performing venue, as reported for real contexts. However, these changes were not related to modulations of attentional performance.

Development of an affective database made of interactive virtual environments.

Despite the great potential of Virtual Reality (VR) to arouse emotions, there are no VR affective databases available as it happens for pictures, videos, and sounds. In this paper, we describe the validation of ten affective interactive Virtual Environments (VEs) designed to be used in Virtual Reality. These environments are related to five emotions. The testing phase included using two different experimental setups to deliver the overall experience. The setup did not include any immersive VR technology, because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but the VEs were designed to run on stereoscopic visual displays. We collected measures related to the participants' emotional experience based on six discrete emotional categories plus neutrality and we included an assessment of the sense of presence related to the different experiences. The results showed how the scenarios can be differentiated according to the emotion aroused. Finally, the comparison between the two experimental setups demonstrated high reliability of the experience and strong adaptability of the scenarios to different contexts of use.

Affective Virtual Reality: How to Design Artificial Experiences Impacting Human Emotions.

Computer graphics is-in many cases-about visualizing what you cannot see. However, virtual reality (VR), from its beginnings, aimed at stimulating all human senses: not just the visual channel. Moreover, this set of multisensory stimuli allows users to feel present and able to interact with the virtual environment. In this way, VR aims to deliver experiences that are comparable to real-life ones in their level of detail and stimulation, intensity, and impact. Hence, VR is not only a means to see, but also to feel differently. With the spreading of VR technologies, there is a growing interest in using VR to evoke emotions, including positive and negative ones. This article discusses the current possibilities and the authors' experience collected in the field in trying to elicit emotions through VR. It explores how different design aspects and features can be used, describing their contributions and benefits in the development of affective VR experiences. This work aims at raising awareness of the necessity to consider and explore the full design space that VR technology provides in comparison to traditional media. Additionally, it provides possible tracks of VR affective applications, illustrating how they could impact our emotions and improve our life, and providing guidelines for their development.

Looking Into a Future Which Hopefully Will Not Become Reality: How Computer Graphics Can Impact Our Behavior-A Study of the Potential of VR.

Humans tendency to engage in behaviors that are harmful to themselves, the environment, and the society has always been present on a personal and collective level. However, the concern for this kind of phenomena is increasing, as demographic and economic growth is amplifying its impact on people health, economies, and ecosystems. As a consequence, we have seen the rise of research fields as design for behavior change, with a growing interest in the use of tools as persuasive technologies, serious games and interactive systems to affect people awareness, attitude, and behavior. To these purposes, computer graphics and especially virtual reality (VR) has great potential since it can provide experiences to deepen users' understanding and emotional involvement regarding a variety of social and environmental issues. Here, we discuss the use of VR as a powerful, versatile, and cost-effective tool to deliver virtual experiences that inform and motivate users to change behavior. We describe and relate different aspects regarding sustainable behavior and VR experience design with respect to their potential to support behavior change.

Conveying trunk orientation information through a wearable tactile interface.

We present the design and test of a wearable device capable to detect the user's trunk orientation with respect to the gravitational field and to provide tactile stimulation to correct tilted positions. Vibrations are delivered to the shoulders, the frontal and dorsal parts of the trunk, by using the human body as an indicator of the four cardinal directions. The device was experimentally tested in normal gravity conditions by thirty-nine volunteers. The efficacy of tactile cues was investigated in comparison to visual and visuo-tactile cues. The results revealed that, despite the fact that the time needed to complete the task was shorter when people were guided by visual signals, the tactile cues were equally informative and, in some cases, the trunk spatial orientation was even more accurate. Overall, tactile cues were evaluated by users as more intuitive, effective and accurate.

The Effect of Visual and Auditory Information on the Perception of Pleasantness and Roughness of Virtual Surfaces.

Despite the large number of studies on the multisensory aspects of tactile perception, very little is known regarding the effects of visual and auditory sensory modalities on the tactile hedonic evaluation of textures, especially when the presentation of the stimuli is mediated by a haptic device. In this study, different haptic virtual surfaces were rendered by varying the static and dynamic frictional coefficients of a Geomagic® Touch device. In Experiment 1, the haptic surfaces were paired with pictures representing everyday materials (glass, plastic, rubber and steel); in Experiment 2, the haptic surfaces were paired with sounds resulting from the haptic exploration of paper or sandpaper. In both the experiments, participants were required to rate the pleasantness and the roughness of the virtual surfaces explored. Exploration times were also recorded. Both pleasantness and roughness judgments, as well as the durations of exploration, varied as a function of the combinations of the visuo-tactile and the audio-tactile stimuli presented. Taken together, these results suggest that vision and audition modulate haptic perception and hedonic preferences when tactile sensations are provided through a haptic device. Importantly, these results offer interesting suggestions for designing more pleasant, and even more realistic, multisensory virtual surfaces.

Effects of Interpersonal Sensorimotor Synchronization on Dyadic Creativity: Gender Matters.

Although it is noted that interpersonal sensorimotor coordination can influence several high-level socio-cognitive processes, its impact on creative collaboration is nearly unexplored. Here, we investigated the effects of a form of sensorimotor coordination, that is, sensorimotor synchronization, on a subsequent creative collaboration task. 60 pairs (n total = 120 participants) formed by previously unacquainted individuals performed a tower-building task either jointly or alone, followed by a dyadic creativity task. Tower building time in the joint condition was recorded through a sensorized platform and creativity performance was evaluated by two independent raters based on the quantity and quality of generated ideas. We controlled for gender composition and for the disposition to cooperate and to adopt a creative, analytical style. Results showed that male-male couples were more creative after the joint-action condition, whereas female-female and mixed-gender couples were more creative after the solo condition. Regression analyses of tower building time on creativity performance revealed that building time was a significant predictor of creativity dimensions in male-male and in mixed-gender couples but did not predict creative performance in female-female couples. Overall, these findings suggest that the manipulation of sensorimotor coordination can influence performance in a subsequent creative collaboration task, with the nature, and magnitude of this effect depending on the gender composition of the dyads. These results have potential implications for the design of sensorimotor-based strategies to enhance dyadic creative performance in several contexts, especially for the organizational settings.

Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study.

Awe is a little-studied emotion with a great transformative potential. Therefore, the interest toward the study of awe's underlying mechanisms has been increased. Specifically, researchers have been interested in how to reproduce intense feelings of awe within laboratory conditions. It has been proposed that the use of virtual reality (VR) could be an effective way to induce awe in controlled experimental settings, thanks to its ability of providing participants with a sense of "presence," that is, the subjective feeling of being displaced in another physical or imaginary place. However, the potential of VR as awe-inducing medium has not been fully tested yet. In the present study, we provided an evidence-based design and a validation of four immersive virtual environments (VEs) involving 36 participants in a within-subject design. Of these, three VEs were designed to induce awe, whereas the fourth VE was targeted as an emotionally neutral stimulus. Participants self-reported the extent to which they felt awe, general affect and sense of presence related to each environment. As expected, results showed that awe-VEs could induce significantly higher levels of awe and presence as compared to the neutral VE. Furthermore, these VEs induced significantly more positive than negative affect. These findings supported the potential of immersive VR for inducing awe and provide useful indications for the design of awe-inspiring virtual environments.

Geodesic Spline Interface for Haptic Curve Rendering.

Several haptic devices have been developed in recent years in order to reproduce the sensation of physical contact with virtual objects. Many of these devices are point-based, and some haptic interfaces behave like small surfaces that conform to a virtual shape. None of these allow a full-hand contact with the shape, and they are, in general, too small to render big surfaces. The simulation of tasks, such as the exploration of aesthetic surfaces made by industrial designers in order to check the quality of prototypes, require full-hand contact with the shape on a one-to-one scaled representation of the object. These explorations follow trajectories that can be approximated with planar or geodesic curves. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a linear haptic device that is able to render these trajectories. The device is part of a multimodal system including stereoscopic visualization that allows visual representation of the entire surface. Industrial designers use the system for checking the quality of shapes while exploiting their manual and visual skills. The system has been tested by industrial designers and the results are reported in this paper.