Ghosh, S. (CMPM) – Scientific Sensemaking with Spatial Data in Collaborative Virtual Reality

Collaborative virtual reality environments have the potential to greatly impact scientific progress, especially those relating to existential human problems. Within these virtual environments, scientists could view and interact with spatial data in applications as part of their sensemaking process, however, there are design challenges and barriers to development. This advancement document presents research questions related to the design of these technologies, and a project schedule for completing the dissertation. In the first part, Virtual Reality for Scientific Sensemaking, I describe prior, current, and future work related to collaboratively designing interfaces with scientific domain experts across civil engineering and marine science. In the second part, Taxonomy, I describe current and future work to categorize and generalize XR input patterns for collaborative virtual environments, as these works have been shown to fundamentally enable the design of many apps. In the final part, Open Source Infrastructure Stability, I describe my effort to support the ecosystem through the contribution of interoperable, low-resource, and extensible open source software.

Event Host: Samir Ghosh, PhD Student, Computational Media

Advisor: Katherine Isbister