How would AR make this more interactive? I haven't seen one AR device with an interaction model as good as VR. I also don't know why you'd want to set the real world while visualizing data. Maybe so you could interact with it with other people IRL that are also wearing AR headsets?

A combined AR/VR headset would be amazing for this. I would love AR for a workspace, I can do my work and interact with my team, and then switch to VR to do something more complex.

I've hacked together some small VR visualizations for multidimensional data with particularly hard to understand structure and my experience with that was:

1. Moving through the data set in room scale VR is completely different from seeing and manipulating a 2D projection of it on a screen. Exploration is much more intutive (just move your head!) and the perfect depth information that you perceive feels almost like an additional input channel to the brain.

2. Collaboratively analyzing visualized data with VR would require hacks that render abstract avatars of co-workers and remove a lot of the informational content of direct communication. With AR and a direct line of sight all of these obstructions just go away.