Understanding City Dynamics through Spatio-temporal Visualization

Every time we visit a new city there is a huge effort made in understanding its dynamic, i.e. what are the relevant locations within that city in each time period, for there are large amounts of data to sift through. Although several attempts have been made to combine information from various sources, the majority focus on geographic data, lacking on time representation. In this paper we describe and evaluate three representation approaches for spatio-temporal data, to understand which is better to convey the dynamics of a city at a glance. We devised 2D and 3D visualizations to understand their adequacy to our objectives. Based on the results from the evaluation with users we noticed that they preferred the 2D visualization of the data, but on the other hand there was no significant difference to the 3D representation.