Solving Combined Geospatial Tasks Using 2D and 3D Bar Charts

This paper presents a user study that investigates 2D and 3D visualizations of bar charts in geographic maps. The task to be solved by the participants in this study required estimation of the ratio of two different spatial distance measures and relative ranking among potential candidates. The results of this experiment show that subjects were equally fast and accurate when using both the 2D and 3D visualizations. Visual discomfort was reported by almost half of the test population, but performance was not affected. Our study also showed that frequent game players did not benefit more from a 3D visualization than inexperienced game-players.