IEEE VIS 2026 · TVCG Special Issue

HeedVision: Attention Awareness in Collaborative Immersive Analytics Environments

Tracking, recording, and revisualizing the collective attention of collaborators in shared immersive environments.

Arvind Srinivasan Aarhus University Niklas Elmqvist Aarhus University
arXiv PDF OSF
Three-panel overview. Panel A shows the collaborative attention-aware visualization design space as a two-by-two grid crossing world space against camera space with embedded against separated presentation, plus always-on, explicit, and implicit triggering options; the world-space embedded quadrant is marked as evaluated and the other three as implemented. Panel B shows two co-located users in a mixed reality environment viewing a terrain visualization overlaid with voxel attention cues, coloured blue for User A, gold for User B, and pink where both users attended. Panel C shows the treasure hunt evaluation across a terrain visualization and a 3D scatterplot, with and without attention cues.
HeedVision overview. (A) A Collaborative Attention-Aware Visualization design space covering attention capture, presentation, situatedness, and triggering. (B) HeedVision implements this in a co-located mixed reality setting using voxel-based coverage maps for shared attention. (C) We evaluate it through a treasure hunt task across terrain and scatterplot visualizations with and without attention cues, revealing context-dependent benefits in abstract environments lacking natural reference points.

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 can improve spatial coordination, search efficiency, and task load distribution in collaborative visual search tasks 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 visual search tasks within immersive analytics environments.

Keywords

Attention tracking Eyetracking Immersive analytics Ubiquitous analytics Post-WIMP interaction

Materials

arXiv preprint Open-access author version, including appendices Paper (PDF) Full text with appendices — quotes and bootstrap analysis OSF repository Data, analysis code, study materials, and source code (CC BY 4.0)

Citation

@article{srinivasan2026heedvision,
  author  = {Srinivasan, Arvind and Elmqvist, Niklas},
  title   = {{HeedVision}: Attention Awareness in Collaborative
             Immersive Analytics Environments},
  journal = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
  year    = {2026},
  note    = {To appear. Presented at IEEE VIS 2026.},
}