Immersive Exploration of Ancestral Graphs with TamVR – Design, Evaluation, and Application to Marie Antoinette

Ancestral information, or historic family information, is instrumental in understanding the origin of families and persons. The ancestral information of European nobility is of key importance to understanding historic properties and developments of regions, countries, and their interrelationships. Genealogical information is hence a historic and cultural heritage of highest importance. While historic ancestral information is typically well-curated by historians, its exploration, analysis, and exhibition is often limited by existing tools, especially, limitations of exploring and visualizing ancestral graphs. Recent graph visualization offers advanced visualization and interaction facilities to efficiently and effectively navigate and explore ancestral data sets. The previously introduced Topographic Attribute Maps (TAM) visualization integrates relationship and timeline information in a dense topographic visualization. While the original implementation was focused on desktop-based visual exploration, we propose an immersive analytics design and implementation. We introduce a novel, appropriate and information-rich landscape and settlement/family metaphor and belonging interaction and exploration facilities. Our design supports the engaging and at the same time, effective perception of rich ancestral relationship and temporal data properties. The navigation and mapping facilities invite users to explore the ancestral graph information. We show the usage and effectiveness of our immersive approach by a use case discussion and qualitative feedback obtained from evaluation sessions.