Virtually physical presentation of data layers for spatio temporal urban data visualization

Résumé En

Immersion into the urban atmosphere is an urbanist's first and most lengthy step and commonly recurs many times during their work on a project. Due to the great diversity and amount of data that is necessary to achieve sufficient immersion into the particular domain of which there also are a great many there is not one perfect and all-encompassing exploration system in use. We propose a visualization system that groups different data mappings or even subsets of the underlying urban geometry into dynamic layers. In a freely movable 3D environment, these layers are fixed only in the vertical dimension in a dynamic stack. Each layer can be combined with any other to recreate the views offered by conventional mapping software, the novelty lies in the spatial and visual coherence that results from vertical stacking, allowing many more kinds of data to be displayed simultaneously without adding visual clutter. This paper outlines our process of discovering aspects of urbanists' work that could potentially be improved by new data visualization methods and describes the above approach to provide one possible solution.