Progressive Value Reading: The Use of Motion to Gradually Examine Data Involving Large Magnitudes

TL;DR

This paper defines progressive value reading as the use of motion to progressively examine an information object encoding a single value, enabling magnitudes to be perceived through visceral experience. It builds a corpus of 55 examples and derives a design space with $10$ dimensions across data representation, motion implementation, and engagement strategies, accompanied by an online corpus. The work differentiates this approach from traditional multiscale and scrollytelling methods, outlines concrete design decisions, and discusses potential benefits, limitations, and directions for empirical evaluation. By providing a concrete vocabulary and a comprehensive design framework, the paper aims to guide designers and researchers in creating and evaluating motion-based representations of large-magnitude data, with implications for education, public communication, and impactful storytelling.

Abstract

People often struggle to interpret data with extremely large or small values, or ranges spanning multiple orders of magnitude. While traditional approaches, such as log scales and multiscale visualizations, can help, we explore in this article a different approach used in some emerging designs: the use of motion to let viewers gradually experience magnitude -- for example, interactive graphics that require long scrolling or street paintings stretching hundreds of meters. This approach typically demands substantial time and sustained interaction, translating differences in magnitude into a visceral sense of duration and effort. Although largely underexplored, this design strategy offers new opportunities. We introduce the term progressive value reading to refer to the use of motion to progressively examine an information object that encodes a value, where the amount of motion reflects the value. We compiled a corpus of 55 real-life and hypothetical visualization examples that allow, encourage, or require progressive value reading. From this corpus, we derived a design space of ten design dimensions, providing a shared vocabulary, inspiration for novel techniques, and a foundation for empirical evaluation. An online corpus is also available for exploration.

Figures (10)

• Figure 1: Two examples of progressive value reading designs: (a) Chart painted on a street showing Yale University's annual contribution to its home city of New Haven (red rectangle) vs. its $32 billion endowment (blue stripe, 200-meter long) \ref{['ex:C4']} (Photo credit: Davarian L. Baldwin). (b) The video 8 Billion People in Perspective shows the entire world population as a huge crowd assembled in a vast area, while architectural landmarks are used to give a sense of scale \ref{['ex:C2']} (image credit: MetaBallStudios).
• Figure 2: Planetenweg Uetliberg–Felsenegg\ref{['ex:C7']} is a hiking trail featuring a scale model of the solar system where every meter corresponds to one million kilometers of actual distance. The trail starts with the sun, at a size of 1.39 m, and continues along the planets until Pluto. Each segment of the trail between two planets is progressively examined. Photos released under CC0.
• Figure 3: Number of Deaths in World War II per Country\ref{['ex:C24']} (Image credit: MetaBallStudios) is a YouTube video in which the camera moves through a series of 3D bars. Progressive value reading occurs when the camera moves up to reveal very tall bars.
• Figure 4: The design space overview.
• Figure 5: The hypothetical example \ref{['ex:C40']} in sub-figure (a) applies VR in which viewers experience a roller coaster with the track made of concatenated stacks of 100-dollar bills representing the wealth of the richest person in the world. The hypothetical example \ref{['ex:C42']} in sub-figure (b) applies AR to overlay stacks of 100-dollar bills onto a street to compare the wealth of normal and the richest people.