2D and 3D presentation of spatial data: A systematic review

The question whether to use 2D or 3D for data visualization is generally difficult to decide. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional visualization techniques exhibit different advantages and disadvantages related to various perceptual and technical aspects such as occlusion, clutter, distortion, or scalability. To facilitate problem understanding and comparison of existing visualization techniques with regard to these aspects, this report introduces a systematization based on presentation characteristics. It enables a categorization with respect to combinations of static 2D and 3D presentations of attributes and their spatial reference. Further, it complements existing systematizations of data in an effort to formalize a common terminology and theoretical framework for this problem domain. We demonstrate our approach by reviewing different visualization techniques of spatial data according to the presented systematization.