Abstract

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.

Keywords —— Visual storytelling, authoring tools, data video, geographic visualization

Preview & Introductory Video

Demo: Authoring camera movements with GeoCamera

Demo: Data videos made with GeoCamera

Supplementary Material

Coding of camera movements in 66 geographic videos: [Google Sheet]

Citation

Wenchao Li, Zhan Wang, Yun Wang, Di Weng, Liwenhan Xie, Siming Chen, Haidong Zhang, and Huamin Qu. 2023. GeoCamera: Telling Stories in Geographic Visualizations with Camera Movements. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’23). Article No. 170. 15 pages. ACM, New York, NY, USA. DOI: 10.1145/3544548.3581470

@InProceedings {li2023geocamera,
    author = {Li, Wenchao and Wang, Zhan and Wang, Yun and Weng, Di and Xie, Liwenhan and Chen, Siming and Zhang, Haidong and Qu, Huamin},
    title = {GeoCamera: Telling Stories in Geographic Visualizations with Camera Movements},
    year = {2023},
    isbn = {9781450394215},
    publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
    address = {New York, NY, USA},
    url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581470},
    doi = {10.1145/3544548.3581470},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
    articleno = {170},
    numpages = {15},
    location = {Hamburg, Germany},
    series = {CHI '23}
}