Evolutive 3D Urban Data Representation through Timeline Design Space

Abstract Cities are constantly changing to adapt to new societal and environmental challenges. Understanding their evolution is thus essential to make informed decisions about their future. To capture these changes, cities are increasingly offering digital 3D snapshots of their territory over time. However, existing tools to visualise these data typically represent the city at a specific point in time, limiting a comprehensive analysis of its evolution. In this paper, we propose a new method for simultaneously visualising different versions of the city in a 3D space. We integrate the different versions of the city along a new way of 3D timeline that can take different shapes depending on the needs of the user and the dataset being visualised. We propose four different shapes of timelines and three ways to place the versions along it. Our method places the versions such that there is no visual overlap for the user by varying the parameters of the timelines, and offer options to ease the understanding of the scene by changing the orientation or scale of the versions. We evaluate our method on different datasets to demonstrate the advantages and limitations of the different shapes of timeline and provide recommendations so as to which shape to chose.