A low-cost multi-user augmented reality application for data visualization

Among the existing platforms, the mobile platform provides most of the augmented reality experiences for users. Augmented reality solutions have been applied in several contexts due to technological advances in this area. However, many of these advances are still out of reach of more massive access by regular users due to access limitations or the cost of these new technologies. After conducting a literature review considering the application of data visualization in augmented reality environments, we have identified an evolution of equipment used in this context with a decrease of low-cost proposals. Hence, the works related to these two areas showed high use of technologies not yet accessible to the vast majority of users. Thus, we propose a low-cost augmented reality application that can be used on mobile devices for data visualization. We developed a hybrid proposal of an augmented reality prototype to interacting with cards through the mobile device to support the process of creating data visualization. The tangible cards have a design that helps the user in the visualization creation process, indicating each card’s role in the interaction process. The proposed application supports a multi-user environment, allowing multiple users to interact simultaneously with data visualizations in the AR environment. The visualizations are generated on a dedicated server for this function, providing a set of seven different types of visualization. To validate the developed prototype we performed two tests, the first being a stress assessment on the server that generates data visualizations to analyze the proposed application’s scalability. The second was a remote usability test with twelve participants, to evaluate the interaction and design of the cards, and the viability of this solution for augmented reality applications.