Effects of Large, High-Resolution Displays for Geospatial Information Visualization

Geospatial visualizations are becoming a larger part of society. From using maps to go from one location to another to using battlefield visualizations to help the military, geospatial visualizations are becoming a larger part of people's lives. At the same time, large displays are becoming more prominent in people's lives. From large fifty-monitor tiled displays to dual monitor desktop systems people are using larger displays more often in their daily lives. This dissertation summarizes our work with large displays and geospatial visualizations. We show dramatic increases in performance of more than ten times performance improvement when using larger displays that offer a greater number of pixels. We show performance improvements for a range of tasks from simple navigation to complex pattern finding tasks. This dissertation contributes to the fields of human-computer interaction and information visualization in that it shows performance improvements as analytical force multipliers and explains why such performance exists. It explains how virtual navigation (mouse and keyboard input) correlates to physical navigation (body movement) to explain performance improvements. In addition, this dissertation explains how semantic zooming, space scale, task scale, and task type all are variables that influence human behavior in both navigation and performance. This dissertation addresses primarily geospatial information visualizations, but extends to other generic spatially oriented visualizations. The impacts of large displays for both geospatial information visualizations and generic spatially oriented visualizations are explained.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph. D.

Level thesis:degree_level

doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Computer Science

Department dc:contributor.department

Computer Science

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Ball, Robert Glenn

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• North, Christopher L.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Carstensen, Laurence W.
• Robertson, George G.
• Bowman, Douglas A.
• Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel A.

• human-computer interaction
• large displays
• information visualization
• space scale

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-08252006-103122

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/28793