An Evaluation of Immersive Infographics for News Reporting: Quantifying the Effect of Mobile AR Concrete Scales Infographics on Volume Understanding

Augmented Reality (AR) allows us to represent information in the user's own environment and, therefore, convey a visceral feeling of its true physical scale. Journalists increasingly leverage this opportunity through immersive infographics, an extension of conventional infographics reliant on familiar references to convey volumes, heights, weights, and sizes. Our goal is to measure the contribution of immersive mobile AR concrete scales infographics to the user's understanding of the information scale. We focus on infographics powered by tablet-based mobile AR, given its current much more widespread use for news consumption compared to headset-based AR. We designed and implemented a study apparatus containing three alternative representation methods (textual analogies, image infographic, and AR infographic) for three different pieces of news with different characteristics and scales. In a controlled user study, we asked 26 participants to represent the expected volume of the information in the real world with the help of an AR mobile application. We also compared their subjective feelings when interacting with the different representations. While both image and AR infographics led to significantly better comprehension than textual analogies alone across different kinds of news, AR infographics led, on average, to a 31.8% smaller volume estimation error than static ones. Our findings indicate that mobile AR concrete scales infographics can contribute to news reporting by increasing readers' abilities to comprehend volume information.