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Urbanization has amplified the importance of three‐dimensional structures in urban environments for a wide range of phenomena that are of significant interest to diverse stakeholders. With the growing availability of 3D urban data, numerous studies have focused on developing visual analysis techniques tailored to the unique characteristics of urban environments. However, incorporating the third dimension into visual analytics introduces additional challenges in designing effective visual tools to tackle urban data's diverse complexities. In this paper, we present a survey on visual analytics of 3D urban data. Our work characterizes published works along three main dimensions, why, what, and how, considering use cases, analysis tasks, data, visualizations, and interactions. We provide a fine‐grained categorization of published works from visualization journals and conferences, as well as from a myriad of urban domains, including urban planning, architecture, and engineering. By incorporating perspectives from both urban and visualization experts, we identify literature gaps, motivate visualization researchers to understand challenges and opportunities, and indicate future research directions.
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Towards Identification and Mitigation of Task-Based Challenges in Comparative Visualization Studies
The effectiveness of a visualization technique is dependent on how well it supports the tasks or goals of an end-user. To measure the effectiveness of a visualization technique, researchers often use a comparative study design. In a comparative study, two or more visualization techniques are compared over a set of tasks and commonly measure human performance in terms of task accuracy and completion time. Despite the critical role of tasks in comparative studies, the current lack of guidance in existing literature on best practices for task selection and communication of research results in evaluation studies is problematic. In this work, we systematically identify and curate the task-based challenges of comparative studies by reviewing existing visualization literature on the topic. Furthermore, for each of the presented challenges we discuss the potential threats to validity for a comparative study. The challenges discussed in this paper are further backed by evidence identified in a detailed survey of comparative tree visualization studies. Finally, we recommend best practices from personal experience and the surveyed tree visualization studies to provide guidelines for other researchers to mitigate the challenges. The survey data and a free copy of the paper is available at https://osf.io/g3btk/
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- Award ID(s):
- 1657466
- PAR ID:
- 10206915
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2020 IEEE Evaluation and Beyond - Methodological Approaches for Visualization (BELIV)
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/5p73v
