Using HoloLens for Remote Collaboration in Extended Data Visualization

Good collaboration is about clearance between all the team members to let everyone work transparently towards one goal. Augmented Reality was one of the technologies used for data visualization for an immersive and better understanding and analysis of the data. Hence, the collaboration between users on the visualized data in extended reality can combine the analytic power of multiple individuals, and potentially leading to increased quality of solutions and discoveries. The work presented in this paper discusses a remote collaboration technique for enhancing collaboration on visualized data in Augmented Reality. This was done through allowing the user to be immersed to a certain extent, but not completely replacing their reality. The Microsoft Hololens was used to create an Augmented Reality application that transfers the movements of the remote users in real-time using Microsoft Kinect v2 in the form of a hologram of an avatar. This allowed multiple participants to see each other (embodied as avatars), collaborate and interact with 3-Dimension visualized data as shareable holograms between the remote users. An experiment was conducted on 14 participants. The results indicated that the application was useful and fulfills the requirement. We found that the application successfully provided a rich, interesting, and immersive collaborative experience for the students regarding remote collaboration on data visualization in extended reality.