Spatial computing, generative AI, and open web standards are converging. Three spatial operating systems -- Android XR, Meta Horizon OS, and Apple visionOS -- now ship with platform-level scene understanding. Wearable displays span the range from full headsets to slim smartglasses. Agentic AI operates on the same spatial substrates as the human user. This convergence enables new opportunities for \textit{ubiquitous analytics} (UA): the use of many, physically distributed, networked devices to support data sensemaking anytime and anywhere. But proprietary platforms are settling design conventions that will calcify without evidence-based alternatives. UA has now matured to the point where its intellectual history can be read as a structured genealogy of foundations, contributions, and lineages. We trace this genealogy and organize it into clusters spanning cognition, context, interaction, platforms, visualization, collaboration, and evaluation. Finally, we cross these clusters with each other, yielding a total of 42 future research challenges.
We reflect on an evaluation of an immersive analytics application (Tableau for visionOS) conducted at a large enterprise business intelligence (BI) conference. Conducting a study in such a context offered an opportunistic setting to gather diverse feedback. However, this setting also highlighted the challenge of evaluating usability while also assessing potential utility, as feedback straddled between the novelty of the experience and the practicality of the application in participants' analytical workflows. This formative evaluation with 22 participants allowed us to gather insights with respect to the usability of Tableau for visionOS, along with broader perspectives on the potential for head-mounted displays (HMDs) to promote new ways to engage with BI data. Our experience suggests a need for new evaluation considerations that integrate qualitative and quantitative measures and account for unique interaction patterns with 3D representations and interfaces accessible via an HMD. Overall, we contribute an enterprise perspective on evaluation methodologies for immersive analytics.
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