The Tardis: A Visual Exploration Environment for Landscape Dynamics

This paper presents the creation of a a visual environment for exploring landscape patterns and changes to such patterns over time. Dynamic landscape patterns can involve both spatial and temporal complexity. Exploration of spatio-temporal landscape patterns should provide the ability to view information at di erent scales to permit navigation of a vast amount of information in a manner that facilitates comprehension rather than confusion. One way of achieving this goal is to support selection, navigation and comparison of progressively re ned segments of time and space. We have entitled this system Tardis after the time machine of Dr. Who, to emphasize the exploration of time dependent data and because our use of elastic presentation has the e ect of providing more internal space than the external volume suggests. Of special concern in this research is the extent of the data and its inter-relationships that need to be understood over multiple scales, and the challenge inherent in implementing viewing methods to facilitate understanding.