Volume 16, Issue 3 - Special Issue "Human-Computer Interaction in Geovisualization"

While the generation of geometric 3D virtual models has become feasible to a great extent, the enrichment of the resulting urban building models with semantics remains an open research question in the field of geoinformation and geovisualisation. This additional information is not only valuable for applications like Building Information Modeling (BIM) but also offers possibilities to enhance the visual insight for humans when interacting with that kind of data. Depending on the application, presenting users the highest level of detail of building models is often neither the most informative nor feasible way. For example when using mobile apps, resources and display sizes are quite limited. A concrete use case is the imparting of building use types in urban scenes to users. Within our preliminary work, user studies helped to identify important features for the human ability to associate a building with its correct usage type. In this work we now embed this knowledge into building category-specific grammars to automatically modify the geometry of a building to align its visual appearance to its underlying use type. If the building category for a model is not known beforehand, we investigate its feature space and try to derive its use type from there. Within the context of this work, we developed a Virtual Reality (VR) framework that gives the user the possibility to switch between different building representation types while moving in the VR world, thus enabling us in the future to evaluate the potential and effect of the grammar-enhanced building model in an immersive environment.

The historic Robinson House of Virginia’s Manassas Battlefield National Park survived the Civil War, but was destroyed in 1993 by an act of possible incendiarism. This research investigates how an augmented reality (AR) application for mobile devices could aid in virtually re-erecting history, such as the Robinson House, and thus provide educational, accessible, user-friendly apps for use at heritage sites. Initial results from this research show that AR-based experiences can be developed for heritage sites from customizable open source platforms accessible to historians and archaeologists. The prototype of the AR-based Manassas Battlefield National Park Experience highlights several opportunities for cross-disciplinary research between anthropology, geoinformation science and human-computer interaction.

When a hazard event strikes, the reachability of affected areas is a significant factor that can determine if the situation becomes a disaster. Decision makers have to react quickly while under stress to tasks that depend on the road network, such as management of relief operations, planning of evacuation routes, or food and first aid distribution. In this paper we present an approach for exploring and validating reachability of remote areas through visualization with an interactive tabletop and tablets. We propose a simple way to combine and visualize data from scientists and communities to provide insights into area reachability, as well as the likely impacts of future hazard events on access routes. Moreover, our interface introduces an approach to assess alternative accessibility options to isolated settlements by helicopter or off-road routes that builds on satellite data and interactive collaborative mapping. This set of visualization and interaction techniques facilitates the formation of risk scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities. We developed our research with a case study of landslide threat for an area in Colombia.

Over the last two decades, data visualisation has diffused into the broader realm of mass communication. Before this shift, tools and displays of data-driven geographic- and information visualisation were mostly used in expert contexts. By now, they are also used in casual contexts, for example on newspaper websites, government data portals and many other public outlets. This diversification of the audience poses new challenges within the visualisation community. In this paper we propose personal relevance as one factor to be taken into account when designing casual data visualisations, which are meant for the communication with non-experts. We develop a conceptual model and present a related set of design techniques for interactive web-based visualisations that are aimed at activating personal relevance. We discuss our proposed techniques by applying them to a use case on the visualisation of air pollution in London (UK).

Ethical aspects are of key importance in research and the development of technical systems. They play a major role when the societal impact of innovative products and new technologies is considered. However, ethics are already essential during technology development, especially when testing these technologies with human participants. The latter is becoming increasingly important when applying for project funding and for publishing peer reviewed journal papers. Responding to these needs, a local ethics committee at the Department of Psychology and Ergonomics at Technische Universität Berlin was founded in 2009. In this paper, we present an analysis of common pitfalls and blind spots that were detected by reviewers of this ethics committee. We studied the reviews of 98 applications for ethical approval. Results show that researchers (a) often lack concrete knowledge about potential ethical issues of their research and (b) that they might benefit from convenient tools to address relevant ethical challenges at early stages of product design. Based on the results of our analysis, we propose a set of six simple rules that can help to detect and to overcome most of the frequently appearing ethical issues.

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) are web-based tools designed to help voters to find a political party that matches their political views. In the past decade, VAAs have been developed in several countries in order to stimulate political discussion especially among the young and to facilitate a voting decision. At the same time, social media such as Twitter play an increasingly important role for political discussion and opinion formation. The aim of the present research is to explore the interplay of VAAs and social media. We analyzed 500 tweets regarding the main VAA in Germany, the ‘Wahl-O-Mat’, during the pre-election phase of the federal state election in North Rhine Westphalia. As a main result, we discovered that tweets that recommended the app as a product did not obtain high levels of social impact, whereas tweets with self-portrayal content (e.g., posting one’s own VAA result) elicited more engagement by other twitter users. Further results are interpreted through the lens of psychological theories. Finally, we outline practical implications for potential product improvement of the Wahl-O-Mat. Altogether, the present paper highlights the importance of integrating psychological research in the process of VAA development.