Living Globe: Tridimensional interactive visualization of world demographic data

TL;DR

Living Globe is an interactive 3D visualization tool for exploring various demographic data across countries over time, enhancing user understanding through flexible visual mappings and supporting both novice and advanced users.

Contribution

The paper introduces Living Globe, a novel 3D globe application for demographic data visualization with customizable visual mappings and evaluation results.

Findings

Effective visualization of demographic data on a 3D globe

Flexible mapping options improve user engagement

Positive evaluation results from heuristic and usability testing

Abstract

This paper presents Living Globe, an application for visualization of demo- graphic data supporting the temporal comparison of data from several countries represented on a 3D globe. Living Globe allows the visual exploration of the following demographic data: total population, population density and growth, crude birth and death rates, life expectancy, net migration and population per- centage of different age groups. While offering unexperienced users a default mapping of these data variables into visual variables, Living Globe allows more advanced users to select the mapping, increasing its flexibility. The main aspects of the Living Globe model and prototype are described as well as the evaluation results obtained using heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Some conclusions and ideas for future work are also presented.