Trajectory Data Visualization on Mobile Devices with Animated Maps

Abstract

With the increasing popularity of mobile devices (like smartphones and tablets) and georeferenced applications, more people record and analyse their own movement data. This pattern is noticeable with the increasing usage of mobile applications that, in addition to record the evolution of a person's location over time, also allow the visualization of that information, typically, in the form of 2D static maps, complemented with various representations to extract knowledge from the data. Despite the various studies addressing spatio-temporal data visualization, its application on mobile devices for the representation of personal trajectory data is still somewhat unexplored. Animated maps have been proposed as a potential intuitive and appealing technique for the visualization of information in a dynamic way, particularly for the detection of spatio-temporal data relations. We aim to address these issues by presenting a comparative study between static and animated representations of human movement on a mobile device context. Our results suggest that although it may not significantly improve user understanding of the data, the use of animated maps is a preferred and less interactively demanding option over static maps.