Towards Immersive Humanitarian Visualizations

TL;DR

This paper explains why immersive display technologies taken broadly open up a range of opportunities for humanitarian visualization, and introduces immersive humanitarian visualization as a promising research area in information visualization.

Abstract

This paper introduces immersive humanitarian visualization as a promising research area in information visualization. Humanitarian visualizations are data visualizations designed to promote human welfare. This paper explains why immersive display technologies taken broadly (e.g, virtual reality, augmented reality, ambient displays and physical representations) open up a range of opportunities for humanitarian visualization. In particular, immersive displays offer ways to make remote and hidden human suffering more salient. They also offer ways to communicate quantitative facts together with qualitative information and visceral experiences, in order to provide a holistic understanding of humanitarian issues that could support more informed humanitarian decisions. But despite some promising preliminary work, immersive humanitarian visualization has not taken off as a research topic yet. The goal of this paper is to encourage, motivate, and inspire future research in this area.

Figures (18)

• Figure 1: Two humanitarian visualizations. Left: interactive infographics by Bonnie Berkowitz and Chris Alcantara for the Washington Post, showing victims of mass shootings in the US. Right: Documentary The Fallen of World War II by Neil Halloran. Images from https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/mass-shootings-in-america/ and https://youtu.be/DwKPFT-RioU?t=433.
• Figure 2: Immersive humanitarian visualization by Ivanov and colleagues ivanov2018explorationivanov2019walk. Each silhouette represents a person who died from a mass shooting in the US. Viewers can step back to get an overview of the dataset (A), or come closer to gather information about individual victims such as their age group or gender, which are encoded by the shape of the silhouette (B, C). Image from ivanov2019walk.
• Figure 3: Immersive humanitarian visualization by Ali Eslami titled DeathTolls Experience. The viewer is shown data about three different mass casuality events (terrorist attacks in Europe, refugee deaths in the Mediterranean Sea, and the Syrian civil war). Each body represents one death. Image from https://youtu.be/reReeH7CbEY?t=53.
• Figure 4: Exhibit at the 9/11 Memorial Museum showing photos of 2,997 people killed during the 9/11 terrorist attack. Image from https://www.hawkeyenews.net/features/2019/05/06/9-11-memorial/.
• Figure 5: Dollar street. Photos of beds of people with different incomes and different living places. https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street?. Images CC BY 4.0.