Watch that Seam! Designing Hybrid Presentations with Data Visualisation in Augmented Reality

Andrea Bravo, Anja Maier, Philip Cash

Presentations with Augmented Reality (AR) are becoming an essential tool of design teams. They allow designers to more easily connect the dots leading to design ideas. However, data visualisation with AR in the context of presentations are little researched to date. This leaves two key research questions: (1) How to design an AR data visualisation in presentations? and (2) How to orchestrate seams in presentations that include AR? In order to answer these, we report an in-depth Research through Design (RtD) case study, exploring the design process of two data visualisation prototypes in HoloLens. This research process highlights the implications of including a data visualisation in AR in the presentation structure, generating the appearance of seams or transitions between media channels. Based on our findings, we make three contributions. First, we propose the concept of hybrid presentations: as a type of presentation that blends, in the same narrative, at least two media channels that combine physical and virtual media. Second, we explain how seams can be orchestrated in hybrid presentations by introducing the idea of an interaction between channel seams and narrative seams. Third, we translate these insights into concrete guidelines for designers dealing with hybrid presentations and design of data visualisations in AR.