AR EARTHQUAKE VISUALIZATION

AARAV KUMAR | CSCI 1951T

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CLASS ACTIVITY RESULTS

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• Tradeoff between cognitive and physical load on 2D platform. No tradeoff in AR
• Immersion in 2D was significantly lower
• Overall understanding, confidence, and engagement was substantially poorer in 2D
• Both AR parts performed nearly equally – Part 2 (with more controls) was marginally favored in confidence, understanding, engagement, and ease of navigation

Averaged scores

1 – Low

5 - High

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• Most people (7/9) did prefer to choose what visual elements to display
• Around half (5/9) did not find additional options overwhelming. Remaining were split on finding it mildly, or highly overwhelming (personal preference plays a role)
• Almost unanimous agreement that increased choice over visualization settings made data comprehension easier, with 1 feeling indifferent.

AR WITH VS  AR W/O

USER CHOICE

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Identifying spatial patterns

Understanding earthquake depth

Comparing earthquakes

Remembering specific characteristics

Encouraged to explore more deeply

WHICH WAS BEST FOR … ?

FEATURES AND CONTROLS

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• Features with same controls were viewed differently. Scaling and text toggling was more intuitive with buttons, while error bars and map overlays were less so.
• Error bars were most informative, but also most frustrating — caused confusion +  less helpful
• On average, non-button mapped features felt most immersive and interactive — particularly haptic feedback. Changes to the map (terrain exaggeration + map view) also felt particularly interactive.
• Many found map movement controls unintuitive — particularly using the triggers to do so

HAPTICS EXPERIENCE

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• Most users felt the vibrations made the experience more immersive and engaging
• Several users intentionally sought out higher-magnitude earthquakes based on haptic intensity, and found it useful for quick comparisons of different earthquakes
• Mixed perceptions of sensitivity — some users easily felt differences between magnitudes, while others felt they were too subtle to distinguish without text labels.
• Encouraged users to spend more time interacting with the map and made the data feel more memorable

WIKI DELIVERABLES

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Haptics Integration Software Comparison

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Haptics Integration Software Comparison P2​

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Comparison Table

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Meta Haptics Studio Tutorial

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Haptics Types + Applications

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Using Mapbox in Unity (Tutorial) + Resolving Conflicts

HAPTICS PROCESS

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TAKEAWAYS

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• Importance of menus — ran out of buttons, and based on class activity, some features were less intuitive with buttons
• Strengths and limitations of controller haptics — amplitude differences weren't as pronounced as expected, but fine grain control was much more precise than expected.
• Benefits of having broader milestones — I had several backups in mind if different features failed, which made it easy to pivot (e.g., 2nd visualization)

CHALLENGES

• Mapbox + Unity Compatibility – had to struggle for a while with removing bits of code line by line after installing Mapbox SDK, due to many (often unrelated) features being outdated + breaking the Unity builds
• Finding a comprehensive dataset — had to work with two different datasets and match up data manually (one website for earthquake data, other for corresponding seismographs)
• Manual editing of earthquake audio for haptics — much more time consuming than expected.

LEARNINGS

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• How haptics development works (at a low level) — learned similarity to audio/sound engineering
• How to integrate multiple Unity scenes into the same project — rather than having two separate projects / apps, and controlling the scenes with a scene manager instead
• How user choice can be empowering, and encourage deeper exploration (based on results of class activity)
• How to resolve repeated dependency conflicts (caused by Mapbox) in Unity

IMAGES