What path and how fast? The effect of flight time and path on user spatial understanding in map tour animations

ABSTRACT

GIScience scholars have identified map tours as an important visualization type for communicating spatial information: map tours are animations where the virtual camera moves through space and are common on the web, mobile devices, and television. Understanding how to enhance their effectiveness is timely because of recent, growing interest in virtual reality and animated map presentation tools such as Esri Story Maps™ and Google Earth™ tours. Despite this popularity, little empirical evidence exists about how people learn from map tours and how they should best be designed to improve effectiveness. This research is aimed at answering that need. An empirical study is described, which was designed to understand how virtual camera speed, path, and dynamic tilting within a map tour influence subjects’ ability to develop survey knowledge. The results of the experiment show that paths encompassing overviews of the landscape improve the viewer’s ability to build up survey knowledge; that tilting appears to have a much weaker effect; and that combining fast speed and a difficult path within a map tour increases the viewer’s cognitive load.

KEYWORDS:

• Esri Story Maps™
• Google Earth™ tour
• empirical study
• survey knowledge
• zoom and pan

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

​There are no financial interests or benefits that require disclosure for this paper.

Additional information

Funding

​The authors wish to thank the GEES study center, which was taken over by the Higher Education Academy (HEA) in the UK and who funded the original experiment.