Evaluation of 2D and 3D Map Presentation for Geo-Visualization

With increasingly available stereoscopic technology and techniques, it is interesting to investigate new ways of representing information using stereoscopy. Within this context a user study was performed to compare if it is worthwhile to use 3D map presentations over 2D, and to identify how much a 3D stereoscopic map can be slanted without losing the perception of information. Two different visual tasks were evaluated, these visual tasks were: 1) identification of the smallest distance between two points; 2) combinational task that included both the identification of the smallest distance between two points, and the comparison of bar heights. The tested visual conditions were a 2D ('2D') visualization, static monoscopic 3D visualization ('W3D'), and a head- tracking stereoscopic visualization ('S3D'). The respective performance was measured in terms of accuracy and time of execution of the stimuli. Results showed no benefit of using 3D map presentation over a 2D map presentation in both visual tasks. Slanting a 3D stereoscopic map, 55 degrees got the best performance.