XROps: A Visual Workflow Management System for Dynamic Immersive Analytics

2025-07-14

AI Summary

High development barriers and limited domain-expert involvement hinder the adoption of immersive analytical systems for dynamic tasks and real-time data. To address this, we propose a web-based visual workflow paradigm for dynamic immersive analysis. Our system enables zero-code construction and real-time editing of visualization pipelines via visual programming, supporting low-latency fusion and interactive rendering of heterogeneous data—including streaming sensor data from XR devices. Key contributions include: (1) end-to-end instantaneous modification and feedback across all workflow stages; (2) deep integration of XR hardware and real-time stream processing capabilities; and (3) a lightweight, extensible framework for interactive visualization. User studies and multiple real-world case deployments demonstrate its usability and cross-scenario effectiveness. The platform is open-sourced and publicly accessible with an online demo at https://vience.io/xrops.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Video Understanding & Activity Analysis
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Data management and stream processing for Web, mobile and wireless applications
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data visualization
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs

Abstract

Immersive analytics is gaining attention across multiple domains due to its capability to facilitate intuitive data analysis in expansive environments through user interaction with data. However, creating immersive analytics systems for specific tasks is challenging due to the need for programming expertise and significant development effort. Despite the introduction of various immersive visualization authoring toolkits, domain experts still face hurdles in adopting immersive analytics into their workflow, particularly when faced with dynamically changing tasks and data in real time. To lower such technical barriers, we introduce XROps, a web-based authoring system that allows users to create immersive analytics applications through interactive visual programming, without the need for low-level scripting or coding. XROps enables dynamic immersive analytics authoring by allowing users to modify each step of the data visualization process with immediate feedback, enabling them to build visualizations on-the-fly and adapt to changing environments. It also supports the integration and visualization of real-time sensor data from XR devices, a key feature of immersive analytics, facilitating the creation of various analysis scenarios. We evaluated the usability of XROps through a user study and demonstrate its efficacy and usefulness in several example scenarios. We have released a web platform (https://vience.io/xrops) to demonstrate various examples to supplement our findings.

Problem

• Enables immersive analytics without programming expertise
• Supports dynamic real-time data and task adaptation
• Facilitates visual workflow creation for XR sensor data

Innovation

• Web-based visual programming for immersive analytics
• Dynamic modification of visualization steps with feedback
• Real-time sensor data integration from XR devices