ST–TrajVis: Interacting with Trajectory Data

Huge amounts of movement data are nowadays being collected, as a consequence of the prevalence of mobile computing systems and location based services. While the research interest on the analysis of spatio-temporal data has also significantly increased, there are still several open challenges in areas such as interaction and information visualization. In this paper, we present the first steps of a research project that aims to study the usability of visualization techniques of mobility data. We present ST–TrajVis, an application for the visualization of movement data, based on the innovative combination of two popular techniques, namely a 2D map and a space-time cube, augmented with data processing techniques supporting the interaction with interesting subsets of the data. We conducted a user study to assess the usefulness of ST-TrajVis, and to obtain feedback regarding the users interaction with the different techniques. The results suggest the adequacy of the combination of 2D maps with space-time cubes, the existence of some features of interest to users, and the need to conduct further comparative studies between the different techniques.