Future of human-machine interactions and benefits of Immersive Data Visualization
Whether you like it or not AR and VR technologies will not be going away any time soon. Despite its inability to penetrate the mainstream as a successful consumer product, it is only a matter of time before AR/VR headsets will be a market standard and will replace computer screens in every household. The reason for this is simply that the quality of human-machine interactions is drastically improved by giving the user the option to interact with digital content intuitively in a three-dimensional virtual space. Simply put, this means that the interactions in a VR or AR environment translate a lot better to the set of interactions a user is used to using in his day to day life. A click becomes a touch or a point gesture, dragging becomes simply picking up and moving, hovering can now merely be a gaze interaction, etc. This paired with quickly evolving steps in real-time computer graphics rendering will lead to a human-machine interface, with which the user can experience life-like virtual environments and in which he can interact effortlessly and intuitively with digital content. Thus, the applications of tomorrow will no longer follow the design and UX guidelines which we have perfected in the last decades of producing conventional software. This makes any type of research on human-machine interactions in VR beneficial to the process of designing and understanding the applications of tomorrow.


If this premise is not enough to justify the study of these types of human-machine interactions by itself, there are plenty of studies that examine the benefits of interacting with complex digital content in VR over using conventional visualization methods. One such study is a study conducted by the University of Bath, in which they evaluated users’ open-ended exploration of multi-dimensional datasets using VR and compared the results with that of traditional 2D visualizations. While conducting this study they found that there was no overall task workload difference between traditional visualization methods and visualizations done in VR. However, they did find differences in the accuracy and depth of insights that users gain. They suggest that users feel more satisfied and successful when using VR data exploration tools and confirm the potential of VR as an engaging medium for visual data analytics. As for why there were numerous reasons suggested.

Example of a study testing immersive vs. traditional visualization techniques (Source: Institute of Informatics, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul)
First Virtual Reality is fully interactive, meaning that the user has no other option than to engage with his virtual environment. This leads to the user being fully engaged and immersed with the displayed information. As explained above, VR lets the user interact more intuitively with the visualized Data Points and thus, there is no need for a complicated UI. Besides, VR introduces a point of view for the user and can lead to a better understanding through the additional perception of scale. As a result of this, the user can interact with objects at different levels of intimacy. On the one end, the user can interact with the data set as a whole, or zoom in and interact with every individual data point. Additionally, having the possibility to explore multiple dimensions by mapping high dimensional datasets to multiple axes during exploration of data, could lead to new understandings of statistical relationships.
All of these findings suggest that VR data visualization may be beneficial in aiding data professionals to deeper understand and analyze their data. Furthermore, VR data visualization is also beneficial in helping individuals with no data related background understand complex datasets and structures.