Uncovering Visualization Properties that Confuse

摘要

Three dimensional visualizations are becoming one of thepopular web visualization techniques; however, studiesshow that for some users, comprehending 3D visualizationsis not easy. This research investigated what makes 3Dvisualizations difficult to understand with the purpose ofusing this knowledge to develop training to improvevisualization literacy. In particular, we focused on thedifficulties that individuals have with orientation problemsin which they are asked to re-orient themselves to a visualscene from a different viewpoint, something that happensquite often in 3D information visualizations. For ourresearch, we used complex 3D cubes as our experimentproblems and sliced the cubes in different ways such thatthe slices matched the visual orientation a person wouldnaturally take when viewing the slice or required the personto take a different orientation to best determine the featuresof the slice being made. We then compared performance onrecognizing slices that matched a viewer’s orientation tothat of slices that required a re-orientation. Our resultsindicated that the problems requiring a reorientation weresignificantly less accurate.