Living Globe: Tridimensional interactive visualization of world demographic data

📝 Abstract

This paper presents Living Globe, an application for visualization of demo- graphic data supporting the temporal comparison of data from several countries represented on a 3D globe. Living Globe allows the visual exploration of the following demographic data: total population, population density and growth, crude birth and death rates, life expectancy, net migration and population per- centage of different age groups. While offering unexperienced users a default mapping of these data variables into visual variables, Living Globe allows more advanced users to select the mapping, increasing its flexibility. The main aspects of the Living Globe model and prototype are described as well as the evaluation results obtained using heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Some conclusions and ideas for future work are also presented.

💡 Analysis

This paper presents Living Globe, an application for visualization of demo- graphic data supporting the temporal comparison of data from several countries represented on a 3D globe. Living Globe allows the visual exploration of the following demographic data: total population, population density and growth, crude birth and death rates, life expectancy, net migration and population per- centage of different age groups. While offering unexperienced users a default mapping of these data variables into visual variables, Living Globe allows more advanced users to select the mapping, increasing its flexibility. The main aspects of the Living Globe model and prototype are described as well as the evaluation results obtained using heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Some conclusions and ideas for future work are also presented.

📄 Content

Living Globe: Tridimensional interactive visualization of world demographic data

Eduardo Duarte,1, Pedro Bordonhos,1, Paulo Dias1,2, Beatriz Sousa Santos1,2
1Department of Electronics Telecommunications and Informatics, Univ. Aveiro, Portugal 2Institute of Electronics and Informatics Engineering of Aveiro/IEETA, Portugal emod@ua.pt, bordonhos@ua.pt, paulo.dias@ua.pt, bss@ua.pt Abstract.
This paper presents Living Globe, an application for visualization of demo- graphic data supporting the temporal comparison of data from several countries represented on a 3D globe. Living Globe allows the visual exploration of the following demographic data: total population, population density and growth, crude birth and death rates, life expectancy, net migration and population per- centage of different age groups. While offering unexperienced users a default mapping of these data variables into visual variables, Living Globe allows more advanced users to select the mapping, increasing its flexibility.
The main aspects of the Living Globe model and prototype are described as well as the evaluation results obtained using heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Some conclusions and ideas for future work are also presented.
Keywords: Information Visualization, demographic data, 3D globe, WebGL Globe, usability evaluation, heuristic evaluation. 1 Introduction This paper presents Living Globe, a 3D web visualization application meant to sup- port the study of demographic data allowing users to compare data corresponding to several countries along the years. Living Globe allows the visual exploration of de- mographic data represented on a 3D globe and offers functionality not available in other demographic data visualization applications.
While 3D data visualization may have advantages and disadvantages regarding 2D solutions [1], and may be more appropriate in specific contexts, we consider the visu- alization of demographic data on a 3D globe to potentially be a more intuitive and useful approach. There are already other applications allowing the 3D visualization of demographic data on a globe mapping total population or population density (for example) into the height of bars positioned on the globe at the corresponding location. ”World Population” [2] and ”China and US Population” [3] are two such applications, both based on WebGL Globe [4]; however, the applications we have found and ana- lyzed are very limited regarding the represented demographic data, its interactivity and its usability. Throughout this paper we describe the main aspects of our proposal in section 2, the prototype built to test it in section 3, and the results obtained with heuristic evaluation and tests involving users performed to test usability in section 4. Finally, conclusions and ideas for future work are presented in section 5.
2 Related Work In the following section we present 3D data web applications that allow data visuali- zation on a globe and provide interaction to some extent which have inspired our proposal (Fig.1). All except one allow visualizing total population or population den- sity mapped as vertical bars with variable height on a globe.
Fig. 1. Related Visualizations (from left to right): ’WebGL Globe - World Population’, ’WebGL Globe - China and US Population’, ’World Population Density - 2010’ and ’Small Arms and Ammunition’.

These applications were implemented using the WebGL technology or other APIs allowing 3D representations in Javascript, like three.js [5]. These technologies allow the creation of interactive 3D visual objects with textures and shaders in a canvas, and make the solution compatible with various types of devices, requiring only internet access and a browser supporting these technologies (such as the most currently used browsers). One such platform is the WebGL Globe developed in the scope of the “Chrome Experiments” project based on the native API of WebGL, which is an open platform that allows the visualization of any set of spatial data in a tridimensional globe. Using this API, a user can easily map any data to available graphical elements (a bar by default) and positioned in an interactive 3D globe. As mentioned, two projects featured at the WebGL Globe site allow visualizing de- mographic data: ”World Population” [2] and ”China and US Population”[3]. While both represent data provided by the Socioeconomic Data and Application Center (SEDAC), ”China and US Population” represents a more limited data set; “World Population Density” [6] is another example that presents SEDAC demographic data on a globe, implemented in three.js. In these three examples the population of all countries is represented by the height of vertical bars. While the first two offer as single functionality, the possibility of rotating the globe, the latter is not interactive, since the globe rotates continuously which implies that the user has to wait until the

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