Visualization Using Field of Light Displays: Opportunities and New Questions

Visualization techniques are typically evaluated on conventional 2D displays. Current immersive display technology such as headmounted displays (HMDs) and existing (and future) 3D field of light displays (FoLDs) can present visual information with additional perceptual cues not found in 2D displays. We review immersive technology and existing studies which suggest that additional perceptual cues (e.g. stereoscopy and focal cues) from 3D displays can enhance some visualization tasks’ performance. This suggests potential new studies which measure the effect of additional perceptual cues and their influence on effectiveness of visualization methods. We consider the problem of visualizing data which contains interesting structures across multiple scales. We show how immersive and FoLDs provide an opportunity to answer some new questions related to this problem. We hypothesize that the additional perceptual cues of FoLDs can enhance perception of shape structures across multiple scales and we suggest several possible approaches for studying this.