HeedVision: Attention Awareness in Collaborative Immersive Analytics Environments

Abstract

Group awareness--the ability to perceive the activities of collaborators in a shared space--is a vital mechanism to support effective coordination and joint data analysis in collaborative visualization. We introduce collaborative attention-aware visualizations (CAAVs) that track, record, and revisualize the collective attention of multiple users over time. We implement this concept in HeedVision, a standards-compliant WebXR system built with React Three Fiber that runs on modern AR/VR headsets, and complement it with proof-of-concept implementations covering the remaining three quadrants of our design space--varying presentation (embedded vs. separated) and situatedness (world space vs. camera space). Through a mixed-methods exploratory study where pairs of co-located analysts performed visual search tasks in a shared immersive AR environment, we investigate how attention revisualization affects collaborative coordination in immersive analytics. Our results show that CAAVs improve spatial coordination, search efficiency, and task load distribution among collaborators, though benefits vary by context, favoring abstract environments lacking natural landmarks. This work extends attention awareness to multi-user settings and provides empirical evidence for its context-dependent benefits in collaborative immersive analytics environments.