Animated Transitions for Abstract and Concrete Immersive Visualizations: A Design Space and Experiment

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.