VRIA - A Web-based Framework for Creating Immersive Analytics Experiences,

Description of impact

Instrumental in setting-up a research collaboration on situated analytics in MR, with the University of Maryland (Prof N. Elmqvist), under the NSF project Dataworld (#1908605), and studentships in Bangor’s UKRI AIMLAC CDT. From the former, outputs include one under-review journal and three journals in progress. The framework has had over 3000 downloads (as NPM package), 9 forks and 26 stars on Github.

Impact Summary for the General Public

VRIA as open source software can be use by the General Public (with interest in immersive visualisation), due to its multi-tiered usage workflow. Novice users can upload datasets to the <VRIA> builder tool and quickly produce immersive visualizations without coding. Intermediate users can use a Web-based builder to create a visualization configuration file or write one from scratch to use in their application. Finally, advanced users can make use of <VRIA>’s API to develop additional features.

Description of the underpinning research

The world’s first development framework for creating immersive analytics in Web-based VR/MR, built natively upon the Immersive Web concept. An alternative to game engine-based systems from Harvard, Chicago and Monash, VRIA employs state-of-the-art techniques, such as a declarative grammar, and a multi-proficiency workflow. Its open-standards outputs can be integrated natively to Web interfaces, offering superior integration capabilities.

Beneficiaries and reach of impact

Anyone with an interest in developing Immersive and Situated Analytics applications for the web, including the communities of Human-Computer Interaction, Information Visualisation and Mixed/Augmented/Virtual Reality.

General Notes

The toolkit is under constant development and refinement. It has also been used in three undergraduate projects, whereas we are aware that other universities are employing it in their research activities (Edinburgh, and Konstanz at this point). The underpinning research also contributed thematically to the DSP Centre of Excellence, as an application/demonstration of future network technologies and their associated applications. It has already been demonstrated to officials from the Welsh Government, whereas it forms an important pillar of the commercialisation plan of the DSP Centre (on the application layer). The framework can be used in a variety of application domains where immersive data visualisation is needed and therefore has the potential to be impactful in a number of categories.

Impact status	Ongoing
Impact date	2020
Category of impact	Technological, Policy and Public Services, Economic, Environmental
Impact level	Adoption