Abstract With the onset of digital technologies, conveying information to the young generation is becoming evermore challenging, forcing us to explore alternative methods, such as using video games. A typical area that could benefit from innovation is geography, where we want to convey the relationship between selected geographical locations and related phenomena, such as flooding, global warming, criminality, or service availability. Appropriate visualization and interaction in an engaging environment can significantly increase the chance of this information being embraced. To address this, we present T erra T inker , an open‐source tool that transforms geospatial data into visualizations within the Minecraft video game. The interface of the tool enables users without extensive programming skills to adjust the visual appearance of the generated map according to their needs. The tool was tested and evaluated by visualization and geography experts, who gave us valuable feedback and confirmed the benefits and contributions of T erra T inker .

Effective security patrol management is critical for ensuring safety in diverse environments such as art galleries, airports, and factories. The behavior of patrols in these situations can be modeled by patrolling games. They simulate the behavior of the patrol and adversary in the building, which is modeled as a graph of interconnected nodes representing rooms. The designers of algorithms solving the game face the problem of analyzing complex graph layouts with temporal dependencies. Therefore, appropriate visual support is crucial for them to work effectively. In this paper, we present a novel tool that helps the designers of patrolling games explore the outcomes of the proposed algorithms and approaches, evaluate their success rate, and propose modifications that can improve their solutions. Our tool offers an intuitive and interactive interface, featuring a detailed exploration of patrol routes and probabilities of taking them, simulation of patrols, and other requested features. In close collaboration with experts in designing patrolling games, we conducted three case studies demonstrating the usage and usefulness of our tool. The prototype of the tool, along with exemplary datasets, is available at https://gitlab.fi.muni.cz/formela/strategy-vizualizer.

Software developers often have to gain an understanding of a codebase. Be it programmers getting onboarded onto a team project or, for example, developers striving to grasp an external open-source library. In either case, they frequently turn to the project's documentation. However, documentation in its traditional textual form is ill-suited for this kind of high-level exploratory analysis, since it is immutable from the readers' perspective and thus forces them to follow a predefined path. We have designed an approach bringing aspects of software architecture visualization to API reference documentation. It utilizes a highly interactive node-link diagram with expressive node glyphs and flexible filtering capabilities, providing a high-level overview of the codebase as well as details on demand. To test our design, we have implemented a prototype named Helveg, capable of automatically generating diagrams of C# codebases. User testing of Helveg confirmed its potential, but it also revealed problems with the readability, intuitiveness, and user experience of our tool. Therefore, in this paper, which is an extended version of our VISSOFT paper with DOI 10.1109/VISSOFT64034.2024.00012, we address many of these problems through major changes to the glyph design, means of interaction, and user interface of the tool. To assess the improvements, this new version of Helveg was evaluated again with the same group of participants as the previous version.

Achieving the feeling of enjoyment from a reading activity might be harder for consumers due to their gradual adaptation to digital media that provide fast and intense experiences.To preserve the reading tradition with the help of digital technologies, we focus on adapting fiction to virtual reality (VR).This study investigates how VR readers perceive differences between narrative absorption and presence, how their individual ability to get absorbed by narratives affects their VR reading experience, and how a visually saturated VR space influences their imagination.We conducted a mixed methods study (n = 42) using our VR reading prototype.The results show that the VR reading experience was perceived as symbiotic between the text and visuals and that the mental imagery of individual readers adapted to the visual style of the VR scene.