Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
11
Experiences of Using State of
the Art Immersive Technologies
for Geographic Visualization
Martin Turner and Mary McDerby
Research Computing Services, University of Manchester
11.1 Introduction
Over the past couple of decades we have seen a rapid decrease in the price of hardware
components for visualization technology, including graphics card, projectors and display
screens. As a result, within the academic scientific community in the UK there are now a
few hundred high-end visualization centres offering various levels of immersive or semi-
immersive experiences. Immersive systems try to make you unaware of your physical self
by presenting visual and at times non-visual stimuli through devices including headsets,
large-scale screens and high-resolution displays. This expansion has, therefore, opened the
door for many new researchers, including those in geographic studies, to explore new forms
of visualization experiences and different modes of interactive graphical investigation.
Scientific and information visualizations have immense power to convince and illustrate,
and at times enable users to gain a higher level of insight and inspiration within their
geographic, spatial or statistical data. Spence (2006, p5) described the process of gaining
insight from data through visualization as the 'ah-ha -
now
I understand' exclamation
from possibly just a single glance. For a variety of data types some of the most famous good
examples of visualizations have been collated by Tufte in his series of topics (Tufte, 1991, 1997,
2001, 2006), and specifically for the field of cartography and statistical visualization, Friendly
and Davis (2006) have compiled an extensive milestone timeline. When applied within
visualization centres, the experience has been termed creating a heightened level of 'presence'
(Slater, Steed and Chrysanthou, 2002), achieved by combining good visualization techniques
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