The Impact of Interactivity on Comprehending 2D and 3D Visualizations of Movement Data.

GPS, RFID, and other technologies have made it increasingly common to track the positions of people and objects over time as they move through two-dimensional spaces. Visualizing such spatio-temporal movement data is challenging because each person or object involves three variables (two spatial variables as a function of the time variable), and simply plotting the data on a 2D geographic map can result in overplotting and occlusion that hides details. This also makes it difficult to understand correlations between space and time.

DiffAni: visualizing dynamic graphs with a hybrid of difference maps and animation.

Visualization of dynamically changing networks (graphs) is a significant challenge for researchers. Previous work has experimentally compared animation, small multiples, and other techniques, and found trade-offs between these. One potential way to avoid such trade-offs is to combine previous techniques in a hybrid visualization.