SkiVis: Visual Exploration and Route Planning in Ski Resorts

TL;DR

SkiVis is a visual analytics tool that helps skiers explore ski resorts and plan routes tailored to their preferences, integrating automated recommendations with user-specific factors.

Contribution

The paper introduces SkiVis, a novel interactive system combining visual exploration and personalized routing for ski resorts, developed with domain experts and evaluated through user studies.

Findings

Supports preference-based ski route discovery

Enables comparison of slopes using volunteered geographic information

Demonstrates potential for personalized ski planning

Abstract

Optimal ski route selection is a challenge based on a multitude of factors, such as the steepness, compass direction, or crowdedness. The personal preferences of every skier towards these factors require individual adaptations, which aggravate this task. Current approaches within this domain do not combine automated routing capabilities with user preferences, missing out on the possibility of integrating domain knowledge in the analysis process. We introduce SkiVis, a visual analytics application to interactively explore ski slopes and provide routing recommendations based on user preferences. In collaboration with ski guides and enthusiasts, we elicited requirements and guidelines for such an application and propose different workflows depending on the skiers' familiarity with the resort. In a case study on the resort of Ski Arlberg, we illustrate how to leverage volunteered geographic information to enable a numerical comparison between slopes. We evaluated our approach through a pair-analytics study and demonstrate how it supports skiers in discovering relevant and preference-based ski routes. Besides the tasks investigated in the study, we derive additional use cases from the interviews that showcase the further potential of SkiVis, and contribute directions for further research opportunities.