Visualizing Personal Progress in Participatory Sports Cycling Events

This article explores the potential for creating personal visualization of participation in sports cycling as a design study. Examples show riders´ personal narratives and performances relative to other participants in long-distance cycling events. Minimalist cartographic design is applied during the automatic generation of profile maps, which allows personal textual narratives to be attached to visualizations of 3D variations in terrain. Changes in relative position and time-in-hand data during mass participation events are shown as position charts, and animations of rider density over time are used to visualize the progress of larger groups of riders in an event. The designs focus on representing the aspects of participation that evoke an emotional response in an effort to engage users.