GeoCamera: Telling Stories in Geographic Visualizations with Camera Movements

• Wenchao Li, Zhan Wang, Yun Wang, Di Weng, Liwenhan Xie, Siming Chen, Haidong Zhang, and Huamin Qu

• PDF | DOI | Slides (15.5 MB) | BibTeX

In geographic data videos, camera movements are frequently used and combined to present information from multiple perspectives. However, creating and editing camera movements requires significant time and professional skills. This work aims to lower the barrier of crafting diverse camera movements for geographic data videos. First, we analyze a corpus of 66 geographic data videos and derive a design space of camera movements with a dimension for geospatial targets and one for narrative purposes. Based on the design space, we propose a set of adaptive camera shots and further develop an interactive tool called GeoCamera. This interactive tool allows users to flexibly design camera movements for geographic visualizations. We verify the expressiveness of our tool through case studies and evaluate its usability with a user study. The participants find that the tool facilitates the design of camera movements.

The authors would like to thank the experts and participants for their help in the project, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. This work is partially supported by Hong Kong RGC GRF Grant (No. 16210321), a grant from MSRA, and NSFC (No. 62202105).