Designing a Topic-Based Literature Exploration Tool in AR — An exploratory study for neuroscience

The large and increasing amount of scientific literature makes it difficult for researchers to analyse and understand relations between topics even in their specific sub-field. Neuroscience researchers are interested in relations between, for example, anatomical regions of the brain and the diseases that affect them. To explore relations in the extensive body of literature, using the topics themselves rather than individual articles, can provide a higher-level approach. We have created a prototype interactive AR environment to learn more about how topic-based literature browsing might aid researchers in analysing and understanding relations between topics. Given the three-dimensional nature of the brain, we postulate that visualizing neuroscience topics in Augmented Reality would support the exploration of relations between them and thus improve and extend existing literature exploration workflows. We follow a usercentered approach to identify visualization and interaction design requirements. Using an existing analysis of tens of thousands of neuroscience papers, we designed an interactive AR environment to support researchers in finding relations between brain regions and brain diseases that integrates with existing literature review practices. We carried out two qualitative evaluations to verify our design, first with eight neuroscience students as domain experts and then with seven experienced researchers as literature exploration experts. Our analysis of participants’ feedback shows that visualizing topics and their relations in the immersive AR environment is clear, understandable and helpful for topic-based literature exploration, specifically, between brain regions and brain diseases. Our AR literature exploration tool has the potential to be used by neuroscientists in their routine literature review

DatAR: An immersive literature exploration environment for neuroscientists

Maintaining an overview of publications in the neuroscientific field is challenging, especially with an eye to finding relations at scale; for example, between brain regions and diseases. This is true for well-studied as well as nascent relationships. To support neuroscientists in this challenge, we developed an Immersive Analytics (IA) prototype for the analysis of relationships in large collections of scientific papers. In our video demonstration we showcase the system’s design and capabilities using a walkthrough and mock user scenario. This companion paper relates our prototype to previous IA work and offers implementation details

Exploring relations in neuroscientific literature using Augmented Reality: A design study

To support scientists in maintaining an overview of disciplinary concepts and their interrelations, we investigate whether Augmented Reality can serve as a platform to make automated methods more accessible and integrated into current literature exploration practices. Building on insights from text and immersive analytics, we identify information and design requirements. We embody these in DatAR, a system design and implementation focussed on analysis of co-occurrences in neuroscientific text collections. We conducted a scenario-based video survey with a sample of neuroscientists and other domain experts, focusing on participants’ willingness to adopt such an AR system in their regular literature review practices. The AR-tailored epistemic and representational designs of our system were generally perceived as suitable for performing complex analytics.We also discuss several fundamental issues with our chosen 3D visualisations, making steps towards understanding in which ways AR is a suitable medium for high-level conceptual literature exploration

A Virtual Reality Platform for Analyzing Remote Archaeological Sites

This paper describes a Virtual Reality (VR) prototype developed to help archaeologists and other stakeholders explore and analyse archaeological data in a more immersive context. We describe a VR reconstruction of Pleito Cave, a fragile world class rock-art site with accessibility limitation. Key stakeholders are identified and a prototype is described that provides a VR platform for visualizing and interacting with complex archaeological data (gathered from techniques such as decorrelation stretch and X-ray fluorescence) virtually ‘in situ’, in a way that would not be possible at the real site. The prototype allows multiple remote users to interact with the cave together remotely providing opportunities for collaborative interpretation and analysis of archaeological data. We also present a survey-based evaluation in which both archaeologists and Native American stakeholders indicate positive responses for measures of both engagement and value

Multimodal feedback for finger-based interaction in mobile augmented reality

Mobile or handheld augmented reality uses a smartphone's live video stream and enriches it with superimposed graphics. In such scenarios, tracking one's fingers in front of the camera and interpreting these traces as gestures offers interesting perspectives for interaction. Yet, the lack of haptic feedback provides challenges that need to be overcome. We present a pilot study where three types of feedback (audio, visual, haptic) and combinations thereof are used to support basic finger-based gestures (grab, release). A comparative study with 26 subjects shows an advantage in providing combined, multimodal feedback. In addition, it suggests high potential of haptic feedback via phone vibration, which is surprising given the fact that it is held with the other, non-interacting hand