Immersive scientific data exploration faces challenges in precise and efficient interaction. Tangible media offer a potential solution; but designers lack clear guidance on choosing the appropriate physical dimensionality (1D, 2D, or 3D) for different tasks. To address this problem, we present a design space structuring the relationship between the representative techniques on scientific data visualization and exploration, tangible interactions, and media dimensionality. We further developed a prototype to empirically explore these relationships according to our design space. In a controlled user study, we compared 1D, 2D, and 3D tangible media across seven core techniques. The results demonstrated that the 3D media (e.g., a box) were preferred when tasks required manipulating the entire volumetric data and acted as a proxy. Regarding the tasks requiring 2D operations or interior localization, the 2D media (e.g., a card) offered superior performance. For single-parameter techniques like histogram-based filtering, the 1D media (e.g., a pen) were overwhelmingly preferred for their simplicity and perceived ease of use.

In the urban traffic research field, taxi detour behavior analysis can be regarded as one of the most crucial and challenging topics accounting for real-world routing network dynamics with complicated external inducement such as “avoiding congestion sections”, “unfamiliarity with road maps” or just “earning more fee under a longer travel path”. We carried out an interdisciplinary research framework to build a more holistic and profound view of the spatio-temporal distribution of the taxi detour behavior at directional road segment (DRS) level. First, a map matching based detour clustering method was proposed to deal with one week of taxi GPS tracing (divided into 3.4 million occupied trips). Then we employed an established multi-layer road index system in Shenzhen, China, to illustrate the spatio-temporal distribution variation of taxi detour features and statistics. Furthermore, three categories of DRS factors related to road structural attributes, traffic dynamics and point-of-interests (POIs) were defined to fit a selected-sample-based binary logit model. Some remarkable findings include: (i) in Shenzhen on average, 23.5 percent of taxi trips made a detour larger than 2.1 kilometers, which could be astonishingly high considering that only a very few trips yielded formal complaints for fraudulent detouring; (ii) both the level of detour intensity and ratio are affected by road features and dynamics in different spatio-temporal interaction patterns.