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 that runs on modern AR/VR headsets. Through a user study where pairs of analysts performed visual search tasks in HeedVision, we demonstrate how attention revisualization enhances collaborative performance in immersive analytics. Our findings reveal that CAAVs substantially improve spatial coordination, search efficiency, and task load distribution among collaborators. This work extends attention awareness from individual to multi-user settings and provides empirical evidence for its benefits in collaborative immersive analytics.