What Do Focus Maps Focus On?

Maps are an important, everyday medium to communicate spatial information. We are faced with a great variety of different maps used for different purposes. While many of these maps are task-specific and concentrate on specific pieces of information, often they do not support map reading to extract the information relevant for the task at hand. In this paper, we explore the concept of focus maps. This concept has been previously presented with a restricted scope, however it covers a range of different kinds of maps that all focus a map user’s attention on the relevant information, be it specific features or areas. We discuss their general properties and the importance of context for designing such maps, and introduce a toolbox for constructing schematic maps that provides a generic way of generating the different kinds of maps discussed. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence supporting our approach and outline how navigation in 3D virtual environments may benefit from a transfer of the proposed concept of focus maps from 2D to 3D.