Visual Narratives for Conveying Routing Information
ISBN 978-85-88783-11-9
Authors
1Jahnke, M.; 2Cron, J.
1CHAIR OF CARTOGRAPHY, TUM Email: mathias.jahnke@tum.de
2CHAIR OF CARTOGRAPHY, TUM Email: juliane.cron@tum.de
Abstract
The amount of spatial data is increasing constantly. This includes the availability of 3d spatial data of city models as well as information about the interior. To make this information usable for navigation, data explo-ration and analyzation it has to be visualized in a graphical-ly/cartographically sufficient way. In particular, the visualization of the inner space and the representation of routing hints are a demanding task. The drawbacks of indoor visualizations are that only the inner space of a building is used for navigation and in most cases the view along an aisle gives the user information on orienteering themselves. In addition, the user gets only a feasible overview of the entire route, espe-cially if the route is crossing different levels and is going back and forth on different floors. Krisp et al. (2014) conveyed the interior space and the routing infor-mation by using a non-photorealistic visualization approach. The ad-vantages of a non-photorealistic visualization are the aesthetic appeal and the degrees of freedom to include additional (semantic) infor-mation. In this case the depictions of the inner space are mainly ab-stract and with less detail. The challenges are to avoid the before mentioned drawbacks of visualiz-ing the interior and the routing information together. Therefore, an in-teresting research question is how it is possible to breakdown a 3d route to a 2d visualization. How can a 3d route crossing different floors and going back and forth on distinct levels on a 2d plane be visu-alized? An approach is to leave the “normal” way of representing 3d (in-door) information and to use a method from graphic design. The Meth-od is called “visual storytelling” (Klanten et al. (2011)) and is as well-known as visual narratives, an evolving area in information graphic de-sign. With the concepts of visual storytelling, it might be possible to break down a complex issue to connected, feasible and easy to notice graphics. To apply this approach to visualize indoor routing information, answers to different questions are needed. The most important ones are at which points is it suitable to divide a route into distinct parts and how can these parts visualized independently from another. Along with these questions others arises like what are waypoints or points of inter-est (poi) of an indoor environment as well as how to cope with geomet-ric correctness. After identifying suitable poi’s like areas where the aisle turns, elevators, stairways, ramps etc., it is possible to divide the route into sub routes for individual visualization of each part. These sub routes can be reassem-bled to a whole route by connecting the parts with small graphics includ-ing turning details (left, right, up or down). However, the geometric cor-rectness is dismissed but the relations of the parts of the route are kept. Designing this kind of graphics, which connected the sub routes to a whole one, is a demanding task and shall be accomplished by using car-tographic rules and principles. Besides the turning details, the infor-mation of changing the floor (up or down) has to be enclosed. Another potential visualization approach is to arrange the graphics and turning information on one axis, which reduce the 3d information to a 1d arrangement. The visual storytelling design approach gives much freedom to design a representation of a route within a building. It gives the possibility to choose an appropriate level of abstraction and simplicity compared to existing visualization approaches. This contribution shows how the visual storytelling approach can be transferred into the domain of cartographic visualization. As an example the approach is applied to an indoor route and demonstrates the ap-plicability. KLANTEN, R., EHMANN, S. & SCHULZE, F. 2011. Visual Storytelling - Inspiring a New Visual Language, Berlin, gestalten. KRISP, J., JAHNKE, M., LYU, H. & FACKLER, F. 2014. Visualization and Communication of Indoor Routing Infomation.
Keywords
Visualization; visual narratives; map design