Comparative Analysis with Heightmaps in Virtual Reality Environments

Abstract

3D heightmaps can be considered as an extension of heatmaps using the third dimension to encode the respective value by height, often in addition to encoding it by color. In contrast to 2D heatmaps, 3D heightmaps allow a superposition without aggregation. However, they also have the general disadvantages of 3D visualizations, such as occlusion and perceptual distortion. Previous research has revealed various advantages of stereoscopic displays and virtual reality (VR) in the context of 3D visualizations, for example, concerning memorization, depth perception, and collaboration. In this paper, we present a novel technique to compare heightmaps in VR by introducing a multi-layer approach of stacked heightmaps. We demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of our method by means of a use case on comparative crime data analysis.