This paper presents 4D User Experience design principles (4D-UX), as well as a software implementation and applications of how to communicate spatial and temporal data. The foundation is built on tightly coupling multiple dimensions into one application, adding a sequential story line and finally decluttering the front-end to enhance the emotional and cognitive functions of audiences. The framework suggests a combination of a sequential story-telling approach with 2D, 3D, 4D elements such as interactive sliders added to the flow of argumentation. With those design principles in place, the authors then present a software platform called "Singapore Views" based on the "Unity" game engine. The communication challenge of research groups that had to convey the insights on their studies about the "Urban Heat Island Effect" and "Dense and Green Building Typologies" in Singapore to a diverse group of stakeholders were taken as examples. The paper presents a multi-disciplinary approach with authors from computer science, architecture, design, communication, business administration and urban development. It contributes to the current discussion of how to visualize knowledge and plan future cities.

Urban forms at human-scale, i.e., urban environments that individuals can sense (e.g., sight, smell, and touch) in their daily lives, can provide unprecedented insights on a variety of applications, such as urban planning and environment auditing. The analysis of urban forms can help planners develop high-quality urban spaces through evidence-based design. However, such analysis is complex because of the involvement of spatial, multi-scale (i.e., city, region, and street), and multivariate (e.g., greenery and sky ratios) natures of urban forms. In addition, current methods either lack quantitative measurements or are limited to a small area. The primary contribution of this work is the design of StreetVizor, an interactive visual analytics system that helps planners leverage their domain knowledge in exploring human-scale urban forms based on street view images. Our system presents two-stage visual exploration: 1) an AOI Explorer for the visual comparison of spatial distributions and quantitative measurements in two areas-of-interest (AOIs) at city- and region-scales; 2) and a Street Explorer with a novel parallel coordinate plot for the exploration of the fine-grained details of the urban forms at the street-scale. We integrate visualization techniques with machine learning models to facilitate the detection of street view patterns. We illustrate the applicability of our approach with case studies on the real-world datasets of four cities, i.e., Hong Kong, Singapore, Greater London and New York City. Interviews with domain experts demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in facilitating various analytical tasks.

This paper presents a framework which allows urban planners to navigate and interact with large datasets fused with social feeds in real-time, enhanced by a virtual reality (VR) capability, which further promotes the knowledge discovery process and allows to interact with urban data in natural yet immersive way. A challenge in urban planning is making decisions based on datasets which are many times ambiguous, together with effective use of newly available yet unstructured sources of information like social media. Providing expert users with novel ways of representing knowledge can be beneficial for decision making. Game engines have evolved into capable testbeds for novel visualization and interaction techniques. We therefore explore the possibility of using a modern game engine as a platform for knowledge representation in urban planning and how it can be used to model ambiguity. We also investigate how urban planners can benefit from immersion when it comes to data exploration and knowledge discovery. We apply the concept of using primitives to publicly available transportation datasets and social feeds of New York city, we discuss a gesture-based VR extension of our framework and lastly, we conclude the paper with feedback from expert users in urban planning and with an outlook of future challenges.

This paper presents a method and case study to visualize the urban stock of materials and its availability for use in building future cities. Re-using material from existing buildings for new buildings can be seen as a source for construction materials in times of depleting natural resources. The authors explain the concept of "urban mining" and the challenges, such as "How much resources are available in a city? Today? In the near future?" We explore what data are needed to answer the questions, and then discuss how to best visualize the data in an effective and intuitive way. We apply the concept to an exemplary real-world district in Singapore that is in transformation. Then, we discuss features of a visual tool prototype and explain the thinking behind the design, e.g., how the spatial and temporal dimensions can be presented. Lastly, we conclude the paper with an outlook of future challenges. The paper presents a multi-disciplinary approach with researchers from computer science, architecture, graphic design and material science, and contributes to the discussion of how to visualize knowledge and plan sustainable future cities.

In transportation studies, one fundamental problem is to analyze the departures and arrivals at locations in order to predict the travel demands for urban planning and traffic management. These movements can relate to many factors, e.g., activity distributions and household demographics. This paper presents how we use visualization to explore the relationship between people movements and activity distributions that are characterized by the points of interest (POIs). To effectively model and visualize such relationship, we introduce POI-mobility signature, a compact visual representation with two main components. 1) A mobility component to present major people movements information across temporal dimension. 2) A POI component to present the activity context over an area of interest in spatial domain. To derive the signature, we study assorted analytical tasks after discussing with transportation researchers, consider essential design principles, and apply the representation to study a real-world dataset, which is the massive public transportation data in Singapore with over 30 million trajectories and crowd-sourcing POIs retrieved from Foursquare. Finally, we conduct three case studies and interview three transportation experts to verify the efficacy of our method.

Human’s daily movements exhibit high regularity in a space–time context that typically forms circadian rhythms. Understanding the rhythms for human daily movements is of high interest to a variety of parties from urban planners, transportation analysts, to business strategists. In this paper, we present an interactive visual analytics design for understanding and utilizing data collected from tracking human’s movements. The resulting system identifies and visually presents frequent human movement rhythms to support interactive exploration and analysis of the data over space and time. Case studies using real-world human movement data, including massive urban public transportation data in Singapore and the MIT reality mining dataset, and interviews with transportation researches were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and usefulness of our system.

This paper introduces the concept of dynamic Multi-View, Multi-Format, Multi-User Visualizations. It also suggests aligning all visualization branches to a common problem, namely the design and implementation of future sustainable cities, such as Jakarta, Indonesia. While a lot of visualization research has extensively discussed the emotional, cognitive and coordinative benefits of visual representations, the application of such tools to solve grand societal problems has been neglected. We suggest focusing on Future Cities, since they require solutions and because the field seems to be ideal to align the various subgroups of visualization research. We derived this insight from about 1000 events in our physical value lab and our own software development - the Visual Manager and the Shuffler. The Visual Manager uses visual metaphors to illustrate risk assessment scenarios. The Shuffler is a framework to create coordinated multiple views. The innovative part of this framework is that different visual representations, complementary business logics and datasets can be distributed to different views, which calls for more transdisciplinary work in the design of dynamic multi-view, multi-format and multi-user software. This paper is relevant for researchers in all subgroups of visualization research - especially Knowledge Visualization and Information Visualization.

This paper describes approaches for near-real time collaboration over distance in interactive applications. It presents approaches to tackling most of the encountered challenges by using our interactive risk management tool as an illustrative example. In particular it focuses on browser-based bi-directional client-server network communication, concurrent object manipulations, and data synchronization.

This article discusses three tools that allow making collaboration and decision-making more effective. It presents insights from working in the ldquoETH Baugarten Value Labrdquo, a new research space with five touch displays. First, the article introduces this lab. Then, it introduces two software tools to support communication and group decision-making. The first tool is targeted at urban planners, the second at managers. We found that (1) the lab fascinates and engages the users, (2) that not many software tools are available for such a setting and that those tools are not very user friendly, (3) that people underestimate the time to design suitable workshops. We have found in various workshops that our two tools seem to go in the right direction, which states that ldquoless functionality is morerdquo.

This article discusses an early stage of research on the potential of crowd simulation tools for (marketing) communication purposes in architecture and urban planning. We argue that today, in architecture and urban planning, agent-based simulation tools have been primarily used for analytical purposes, such as the simulation of pedestrians or fire escape scenarios in buildings, and only rarely for the creation of videos for communication purposes, for example for marketing purposes. We found that even with the best available software tools the cost-benefit ratio for architects is not yet optimal and that architects might – from an economic point of view – today be more effective if they outsource such a task to an animation specialist.This paper is relevant for architects, urban designers, communication and PR experts and for researchers in the fields of architecture, knowledge visualization, communication science, agent-based simulations.

It is now time to establish visualization science as a scientific discipline. The proposed deadline to achieve this is 2010. Today, research areas in visualization are isolated. What is missing is the big picture and mutual agendas. To establish visualization science as a discipline, researchers need to agree on the origins and areas of visualization research; then on the long-term (e.g., 2020) research goals. The benefit of an established discipline is more impact, both in teaching (curricula) and research (e.g., framework programmes of the European Union). This article aims to start the discussion on a synthesis through extended definitions and a big picture. It provides an example for a sharp and extended definition of a field that today is vaguely defined: information architecture. Finally, it proposes a draft of the big picture of the fields, the visualization science fingerprint, thus a step towards an established visualization science

This paper presents a framework and three case studies on knowledge maps in organizations. In organizations, speed, clarity, and effectiveness are essential for the transfer of knowledge. Today, mainly text is used. This paper illustrates how knowledge maps, a subset of knowledge visualization, help to transfer strategic knowledge in organizations. First, we introduce a framework that structures knowledge maps. Secondly, we describe with three complementary case studies how organizations profited from the various functions of knowledge maps. The findings are important for researchers in the fields of knowledge visualization, information visualization, knowledge management and for practitioners from different industries.

In this paper, we describe a tool to improve inter-functional communication of project plans by displaying them as a metro map. Our tool automatically lays out plans using a multicriteria system adapted for the application area. Previous studies have shown that displaying project plans using a metro map metaphor as a complementary visualization to Gantt charts attracts and engages individuals, presents an overview of detail and initiates discussions. Creating such a map manually is time consuming. Hence, we have developed a software tool that converts a standard planning format into a metro map visualization and assists designers in generating comprehensible layouts. Our findings may be important for researchers in the domain of human computer interaction, project managers, knowledge visualization and communication scientists.

This work focuses on an aspect which has been neglected, but which is decisive: the transfer of knowledge to different stakeholders; especially the transfer of insights derived from information visualization tools. In knowledge management, the transfer of knowledge is a core process, which can be improved by using our innate abilities to process visual representations. The potential of visualizations are manifold. But business managers miss a holistic framework on the use of visualization methods for information exploration and communication tasks. This paper analyzes how architects use visualizations to amplify cognition and to transfer knowledge. It introduces a mediating framework that brings together isolated research directions and defines the new research focus knowledge visualization. Knowledge visualization examines the use of visualizations for the transfer of knowledge between at least two people. We found that the new focus is decisive and has implications for researchers in information visualization and knowledge management.