CineFolio: Cinematography-guided camera planning for immersive narrative visualization

Abstract

Narrative visualization facilitates data presentation and communicates insights, while virtual reality can further enhance immersive and engaging experiences. The combination of these two research interests shows the potential to revolutionize the way data is presented and understood. Within the realm of narrative visualization, empirical evidence has particularly highlighted the importance of camera planning. However, existing works primarily rely on user-intensive manipulation of the camera, with little effort put into automating the process. To fill the gap, this paper proposes CineFolio, a semi-automated camera planning method to reduce manual effort and enhance user experience in immersive narrative visualization. CineFolio combines cinematic theories with graphics criteria, considering both information delivery and aesthetic enjoyment to ensure a comfortable and engaging experience. Specifically, we parametrize the considerations into optimizable camera properties and solve it as a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP) to realize common camera types for narrative visualization, namely overview camera for absorbing the scale, focus camera for detailed views, moving camera for animated transitions, and user-controlled camera allowing users to provide inputs to camera planning. We demonstrate the feasibility of our approach with cases of various data and chart types. To further evaluate our approach, we conducted a within-subject user study, comparing our automated method with manual camera control, and the results confirm both effectiveness of the guided navigation and expressiveness of the cinematic design for narrative visualization.