Augmented reality (AR) has increasingly been used to communicate environmental impacts, offering greater engagement than conventional displays. However, its effect on message credibility-how much people believe in the content of the communication-remains unclear. In a preregistered study, we compared the perceived credibility of environmental information presented via visualizations on an AR headset or a desktop display. We created display-specific visual encodings (3D concrete for AR, 2D bar charts for desktop) and added two control conditions to cross display and encoding. We found no difference in message credibility between AR and desktop, though concrete AR was rated most engaging. Supplementary material is available at https://osf.io/n4p5c/.

While data visualizations are typically abstract, there is a growing body of work around concrete visualizations, which use familiar objects to convey data. Concrete visualizations can complement abstract ones, especially in immersive analytics, but it is unclear how to design smoothly animated transitions between these two kinds of representations. We investigate a design space of abstract and concrete visualizations, where animated transitions are pathways through the design space. The design space is defined with four axes, each corresponding to a different transformation. We consider different ways to design animated transitions by staging and ordering the transformations along these axes. In a controlled experiment conducted in virtual reality with 16 participants, we compared four types of animated transitions and found quantitative and qualitative evidence of the superiority of a specific staging approach over the simultaneous application of all transformations. Our study pre-registration is available at https://osf.io/8mu73.

Situated visualizations are a type of visualization where data is presented next to its physical referent (i.e., the physical object, space, or person it refers to), often using augmented-reality displays. While situated visualizations can be beneficial in various contexts and have received research attention, they are typically designed with the assumption that the physical referent is visible. However, in practice, a physical referent may be obscured by another object, such as a wall, or may be outside the user's visual field. In this paper, we propose a conceptual framework and a design space to help researchers and user interface designers handle non-visible referents in situated visualizations. We first provide an overview of techniques proposed in the past for dealing with non-visible objects in the areas of 3D user interfaces, 3D visualization, and mixed reality. From this overview, we derive a design space that applies to situated visualizations and employ it to examine various trade-offs, challenges, and opportunities for future research in this area.