Expert Evaluation of the Usability of HeloVis: A 3D Immersive Helical Visualization for SIGINT Analysis

This paper presents an evaluation of HeloVis: a 3D interactive visualization that relies on immersive properties to improve user performance during SIGnal INTelligence (SIGINT) analysis. HeloVis draws on perceptive biases, highlighted by Gestalt laws, and on depth perception to enhance the recurrence properties contained in the data. In this paper, we briefly recall what is SIGINT, the challenges that it brings to visual analytics, and the limitations of state of the art SIGINT tools. Then, we present HeloVis, and we evaluate its efficiency through the results of an evaluation that we have made with civil and military operators who are the expert end-users of SIGINT analysis.