AuxiScope: Handheld Augmented Reality Tablet as an Auxiliary Display for Large-Scale Display Systems

We present AuxiScope, a novel AR-based system designed to enhance personalized data exploration on large wall displays (LWDs) by integrating handheld tablets as auxiliary visualization interfaces. While LWDs offer expanded visual real estate and intuitive embodied interaction, they pose challenges related to effective interfaces for data exploration and analysis, specifically in multi-user settings. AuxiScope addresses these by overlaying supplementary visualizations onto corresponding LWD content, enabling individualized exploration without interference with the visual data displayed on the LWD. To achieve this, we have designed a geometric alignment pipeline that synchronizes the auxiliary visualizations atop the virtual scene. Specifically, by leveraging AR technology, AuxiScope resolves the tablet physical localization, viewpoint computation, and user interaction translation into the virtual space. Subsequently, based on a client-server architecture, it employs remote rendering and delegates computational tasks to the LWD compute nodes in order to minimize memory load on portable devices. We demonstrate the potential of AuxiScope through multiple AR-based interaction techniques across information and scientific visualization scenarios, for both 2D and 3D contexts.