2D or not 2D: Assessing environmental awareness and cognitive load in mixed reality data visualizations : Visualizing gas leak data visualizations for an industrial surveying setting

Sammanfattning: Increasing the environmental awareness of invisible data, such as a city’s air pollution or a household’s energy consumption, has been an ongoing information visualization challenge that has entered the fields of immersive technologies like augmented (AR) and mixed reality (MR). In order to understand how form and dimensional affect this understanding for MR environments, this research investigated what the difference between statistical, iconographic 2D and physical 3D visualizations is with regards to minimizing cognitive load and fostering environmental awareness. By following a HCD process, two MR prototypes were developed for the HoloLens 2 which depicted invisible gas leak data. They were evaluated through a survey and usability study with 14 experts and non-experts, using SAGAT, NASA-TLX and other questionnaires. The results suggest that there is no significant difference between statistical, iconographic 2D and physical 3D visualizations in terms of environmental awareness and cognitive load. However, an analysis of the effect size and qualitative post-interview data imply that the physical 3D visualization led to a higher environmental awareness in all its three dimensions, while an analysis of the cognitive load sub-dimensions indicate that the statistical, iconographic 2D visualization was better suited for lowering cognitive load.