Challenges in Synchronous&Remote Collaboration Around Visualization

2026-03-06

AI Summary

This study systematically identifies and organizes sixteen core challenges surrounding visualization in synchronous remote collaboration. Drawing on insights from twenty-nine international experts, it focuses on five collaborative scenarios—exploratory data analysis, ideation, visualization presentation, data-driven decision-making, and real-time monitoring—and, for the first time, categorizes these challenges into four research and development dimensions: technology selection, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation. Integrating emerging trends in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI), the work proposes a structured framework that offers both theoretical grounding and practical guidance for future research and system design in multimodal, visualization-supported collaborative environments.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Remote Sensing / Geospatial AI
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Data Visualization & Summarization
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Research challenges in human and human-AI computation
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization

Abstract

We characterize 16 challenges faced by those investigating and developing remote and synchronous collaborative experiences around visualization. Our work reflects the perspectives and prior research efforts of an international group of 29 experts from across human-computer interaction and visualization sub-communities. The challenges are anchored around five collaborative activities that exhibit a centrality of visualization and multimodal communication. These activities include exploratory data analysis, creative ideation, visualization-rich presentations, joint decision making grounded in data, and real-time data monitoring. The challenges also reflect the changing dynamics of these activities in the face of recent advances in extended reality (XR) and artificial intelligence (AI). As an organizing scheme for future research at the intersection of visualization and computer-supported cooperative work, we align the challenges with a sequence of four sets of research and development activities: technological choices, social factors, AI assistance, and evaluation.

Problem

• synchronous collaboration
• remote collaboration
• visualization
• extended reality
• artificial intelligence

Innovation

• collaborative visualization
• synchronous remote collaboration
• extended reality (XR)
• AI-assisted collaboration
• computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW)