Core Concepts
This survey presents a comprehensive review of visual analytics techniques and tools for analyzing 3D urban data, bridging the knowledge gap between visualization and domain experts in areas such as urban planning, architecture, and engineering.
Abstract
This survey provides a detailed overview of the state of the art in visual analytics for 3D urban data. It characterizes published works along three main dimensions: Why, What, and How.
Why:
The survey covers a wide range of use cases, including sunlight access, wind and ventilation, view impact analysis, energy modeling, disaster management, urban climate, noise, and property cadastre.
It analyzes the primary analysis actions (lookup, browse, locate, explore, identify, compare, summarize, spatial relationship) and targets (distribution, trends, outliers, extremes, features) of these use cases.
What:
The survey examines the physical data entities (buildings, streets, nature) and the properties of the thematic data (uniform, semantic, multivariate, volumetric, temporal) being analyzed.
It also considers the origin of the thematic data (sensing, simulation, derived, surveyed) and the spatial coverage of the datasets (micro, meso, macro).
How:
The survey reviews the visual encodings (glyphs/streamlines, bar/line charts, scatterplots, matrices, parallel coordinates, 2D/3D maps) used to represent the physical and thematic layers.
It discusses techniques for integrating the physical and thematic layers (superimposition, embedded views, linked views, interchangeable, juxtaposition).
The survey also covers navigation methods (walking, steering, selection, manipulation), occlusion handling strategies (deformation, ghosting, bird's view, slicing, multi-view), and the level of integration between visual analytics and modeling components.
The survey identifies research gaps, motivates visualization researchers to understand challenges and opportunities, and indicates future research directions in this interdisciplinary field.
Stats
"Urbanization has amplified the importance of three-dimensional structures in urban environments for a wide range of phenomena."
"Many phenomena of interest to a variety of stakeholders, such as civil engineers, urban planners, architects, and climate scientists, are inherently three-dimensional, requiring reasoning over the 3D structure of urban environments."
"The transition to more sustainable environments, energy sources, and technologies has underscored the importance of leveraging this 3D structure in its entirety."
Quotes
"Tackling these challenges can be fundamental to uncovering features valuable for decision-making and problem-solving in several domains."
"Our primary goal with this survey is to inform the visualization community about challenges and opportunities."
"We believe that this can foster advancements in both theoretical and applied research in this field and generate a set of well-grounded and concrete recommendations in the future."