Opportunities and challenges for augmented reality situated geographical visualization

Abstract

Augmented reality (AR) enables to display situated geographical visualizations, i.e visualizations that use virtual elements that are displayed in a geographical location. The place where the data is displayed complements the visualization. Many applications that take advantage of AR and situated visualizations exist, but they differ in the visualizations they present, their relationship to the geographic locations and goals. To better understand why and how AR based situated geovisualization is used, we review 45 papers coming from Human Computer Interaction, Visualization and Geographical Information Science venues that present such applications. Inspired by existing classifications, we characterize these papers according to the data they visualize and the geographical distance between the visualization and the data the visualization represents. This analysis reveals existing opportunities for situated geovisualization applications using AR.