Exploring the Benefits of Immersion in Abstract Information Visualization

The benefits of immersion with regard to information visualization applications have rarely been explored. In this paper, we describe a user study designed to explore a variety of information visualization tasks in immersive and non-immersive 3D scatterplots. In the non-immersive version the information was displayed using only one wall of the CAVE, while the immersive version used all four walls. We also examined the effects of head tracking, giving a total of four conditions: four walls in the CAVE with head tracking, four walls without head tracking, one wall with head tracking and finally, one wall without head tracking. By separating the variables in this way, we can independently evaluate the effects of immersion and head tracking. In general, we found the fully immersive condition, (four walls with head tracking) to be most useful in viewing the datasets and performing the tasks.