Legibility enhancement for information visualisation

The concepts of legibility and cognitive maps and the five features of urban landscape with which they are associated are introduced and techniques and algorithms which have been developed to allow these features to be introduced to three dimensional spaces for information visualisation are described.

Abstract

Navigation in computer generated information spaces may be difficult, resulting in users getting "lost in hyperspace". This work aims to build on research from the area of city planning to try to solve this problem. We introduce the concepts of legibility and cognitive maps and the five features of urban landscape with which they are associated. Following this will be descriptions of techniques and algorithms which we have developed to allow these features to be introduced to three dimensional spaces for information visualisation. Next we describe a specific application of these techniques in the visualisation of the World Wide Web and conclude with a look at future development of the system.