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XGobi vs the C2: Results of an experiment comparing data visualization in a 3-D immersive virtual reality environment with a 2-D workstation display

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Summary

Virtual environments are an emerging technology, which make use of 3-D display devices. Currently very little research into using this new technology for statistical graphics has been done. In association with the Iowa Center for Emerging Manufacturing Technology we have been building a statistical graphics application in the highly immersive C2 environment, called VR-Gobi. This paper describes an experiment conducted to determine if the new technology provides an improved exploratory data analysis environment over traditional workstation graphics environments, such as XGobi. A good analogy comparing the difference between the two environments is that one is like a desk and the other like a room. The visualization tasks we compare between the two environments are detecting clusters, dimensionality and radial sparseness in high-dimensional data, and we also compare the ease of interaction between the computer and human user in the two environments.

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Notes

  1. UNIX is a registered trademark of UNIX Systems Laboratories.

  2. X Window System is a trademark of MIT.

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8 Acknowledgments

The research reported in this article has been funded by the National Science Foundation grant DMS9632662.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Iowa Center for Emerging Manufacturing Technology, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011-1210, USA

    Laura Nelson & Carolina Cruz-Neira

  2. Department of Statistics, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50011-1210, USA

    Dianne Cook

Authors
  1. Laura Nelson
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  2. Dianne Cook
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  3. Carolina Cruz-Neira
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Nelson, L., Cook, D. & Cruz-Neira, C. XGobi vs the C2: Results of an experiment comparing data visualization in a 3-D immersive virtual reality environment with a 2-D workstation display. Computational Statistics 14, 39–51 (1999). https://doi.org/10.1007/PL00022704

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/PL00022704

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