Extended Reality in Spatial Sciences: A Review of Research Challenges and Future Directions

• Main Authors: Arzu Çöltekin, Ian Lochhead, Marguerite Madden, Sidonie Christophe, Alexandre Devaux, Christopher Pettit, Oliver Lock, Shashwat Shukla, Lukáš Herman, Zdeněk Stachoň, Petr Kubíček, Dajana Snopková, Sergio Bernardes, Nicholas Hedley
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-07-01
• Series: ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information
• Subjects: extended reality (XR); virtual reality (VR); augmented reality (AR); mixed reality (MR); virtual environments (VE); GIScience
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2220-9964/9/7/439

This manuscript identifies and documents unsolved problems and research challenges in the extended reality (XR) domain (i.e., virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed reality (MR)). The manuscript is structured to include <i>technology</i>, <i>design</i>, and <i>human factor</i> perspectives. The text is visualization/display-focused, that is, other modalities such as audio, haptic, smell, and touch, while important for XR, are beyond the scope of this paper. We further narrow our focus to mainly geospatial research, with necessary deviations to other domains where these technologies are widely researched. The main objective of the study is to provide an overview of broader research challenges and directions in XR, especially in spatial sciences. Aside from the research challenges identified based on a comprehensive literature review, we provide case studies with original results from our own studies in each section as examples to demonstrate the relevance of the challenges in the current research. We believe that this paper will be of relevance to anyone who has scientific interest in extended reality, and/or uses these systems in their research.