On a recent road trip through the south east – a three week escape from the frigid weather engulfing western Massachusetts – I once again, fell in love with my GPS (Garmin Nuvi 740). We hadn’t spent much time together in the past few months, airlines and taxis guided me to me my destination, but now we were spending quality time together. I was looking forward to getting reacquainted. It was love at first unpacking – Nuvi was near perfect out of the box, my only adjustments besides the usual updates, was to change her accent from the bland American English to the Australian Karen [Note: An informal survey shows that about 80% of the men I’ve spoken with set the voice to Karen, while none of the women do].

On this trip I decided to play with the different map perspectives and change from the default 3D (first person viewpoint), and try North Up and Track Up. I prefer the 3D view, while my travel partner, relief driver, and Nuvi rival, prefers an overhead traditional map view when navigating. When I switched to that mode I found it very disorienting and difficult to follow – at one point, “North up” made me think I was heading down the highway in the opposite direction.

Though I spend a lot of time designing better ways to visualize complex information, this experience got me thinking about a few things. First, how does active and passive viewing of the same data set with the similar goals (e.g. getting from point a to point b) effects collaborative work. Second, how can we move from “looking at the data” to “being in the data” and whether that is a useful shift.

The first person viewpoint – not quite a heads-up display since it’s not see-through and requires my gaze to shift away from the windshield – is close to a one:one mapping with the real-world view. This view doesn’t require me to perform any mental transformation of the representation that would compete with my task of driving. I need just-in-time information that is in-synch with my immediate task. My passenger, on the other hand, has a long range view of where we are going and any stops we might like to take along the way and an overhead view provides information at the right level of detail for the task. Though our long-term goals are the same (don’t get lost), our short-term goals require a different representation. My pre-trip back-up (in case Nuvi fails) is via Google maps or Google Earth and I never view the map with a “tilt” perspective. Clearly the map displayed on Nuvi or Google Earth is considerably less of an abstraction than visual analytics tools like Spotfire or Palintir, but maps are an integral part of most visual analytical tools and must support different geometric representations – though they rarely do.

As the lines blur between the interface and the visualization, utilizing different map perspectives can offer better ways to understand the data, which takes us to the second question of how “being-in-the-data” can lead to new insights and the topic of my next post.

- Kipp Lynch