Bivwac

Building Immersive Visualizations for Welfare, Awareness, and Comprehension

Investigating the Effects of Augmented Reality on Message Credibility When Visualizing Environmental Impacts

Augmented reality (AR) has increasingly been used to communicate environmental impacts, offering greater engagement than conventional displays. However, its effect on message credibility—how much people believe in the content of the communication—remains unclear. In a preregistered study, we compared the perceived credibility of environmental information presented via visualizations on an AR headset or a desktop display. We created display-specific visual encodings (3D concrete for AR, 2D bar charts for desktop) and added two control conditions to cross display and encoding. We found no difference in message credibility between AR and desktop, though concrete AR was rated most engaging. Supplementary material is available at https://osf.io/n4p5c/

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The four visualizations we tested, showing data about the quantity of water in m3 needed to produce 100g of (from top/left to bottom/right): lamb, beef, pork, chicken, salmon, vegetarian patty and lentils. The two designs on the left are our main comparison of interest: (ad) an aggregated 2D bar chart viewed on a desktop computer; and (CI) a unitized 3D concrete visualization viewed with an immersive display (augmented reality headset). The next two designs are control conditions: (aI) an aggregated 2D bar chart viewed with an immersive display; and (Cd) a unitized 3D concrete visualization viewed on a desktop computer.

The four visualizations we tested, showing data about the quantity of water in m3 needed to produce 100g of (from top/left to bottom/right): lamb, beef, pork, chicken, salmon, vegetarian patty and lentils. The two designs on the left are our main comparison of interest: (ad) an aggregated 2D bar chart viewed on a desktop computer; and (CI) a unitized 3D concrete visualization viewed with an immersive display (augmented reality headset). The next two designs are control conditions: (aI) an aggregated 2D bar chart viewed with an immersive display; and (Cd) a unitized 3D concrete visualization viewed on a desktop computer.