ST-TrajVis: interacting with trajectory data

Huge amounts of movement data are nowadays being collected, as a consequence of the prevalence of mobile computing systems and location based services. While the research interest on the analysis of spatio-temporal data has also significantly increased, there are still several open challenges in areas such as interaction and information visualization. In this paper, we present the first steps of a research project that aims to study the usability of visualization techniques of mobility data. We present ST-TrajVis, an application for the visualization of movement data, based on the innovative combination of two popular techniques, namely a 2D map and a space-time cube, augmented with data processing techniques supporting the interaction with interesting subsets of the data. We conducted a user study to assess the usefulness of ST-TrajVis, and to obtain feedback regarding the users interaction with the different techniques. The results suggest the adequacy of the combination of 2D maps with space-time cubes, the existence of some features of interest to users, and the need to conduct further comparative studies between the different techniques.