Evaluating 2D and 3D Visualizations of Spatiotemporal Information

• Time-varying geospatial data presents some specific challenges for visualization. Here, we report the results of three experiments aiming at evaluating the relative efficiency of three existing visualization techniques for a class of such data. The class chosen was that of object movement, especially the movements of vehicles in a fictitious landscape. Two different tasks were also chosen. One was to predict where three vehicles will meet in the future given a visualization of their past movement history. The second task was to estimate the order in which four vehicles arrived at a specific place. Our results reveal that previous findings had generalized human perception in these situations and that large differences in user efficiency exist for a given task between different types of visualizations depicting the same data. Furthermore, our results are in line with earlier general findings on the nature of human perception of both object shape and scene changes. Finally, the need for new taxonomies of data and tasks based on results from perception research is discussed.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Människa-datorinteraktion (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Human Computer Interaction (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datorseende och robotik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Vision and Robotics (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Experimentation

Human Factors

2D

3D

animation

space-time cube

spatiotemporal

user studies

Image analysis

Informatics, computer and systems science

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)