Towards Immersive Humanitarian Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper advocates for the development of immersive humanitarian visualizations using technologies like VR and AR to better communicate human suffering and support informed decisions, highlighting opportunities and encouraging future research.

Contribution

It introduces immersive humanitarian visualization as a new research area, emphasizing its potential to enhance understanding and decision-making in humanitarian contexts.

Findings

Immersive displays can make remote suffering more salient.

They enable combining quantitative data with visceral experiences.

The field is promising but underexplored.

Abstract

This paper introduces immersive humanitarian visualization as a promising research area in information visualization. Humanitarian visualizations are data visualizations designed to promote human welfare. This paper explains why immersive display technologies taken broadly (e.g, virtual reality, augmented reality, ambient displays and physical representations) open up a range of opportunities for humanitarian visualization. In particular, immersive displays offer ways to make remote and hidden human suffering more salient. They also offer ways to communicate quantitative facts together with qualitative information and visceral experiences, in order to provide a holistic understanding of humanitarian issues that could support more informed humanitarian decisions. But despite some promising preliminary work, immersive humanitarian visualization has not taken off as a research topic yet. The goal of this paper is to encourage, motivate, and inspire future research in this area.