Abstract
The data produced by sensor networks for urban air quality monitoring is becoming a valuable asset for informed health-aware human activity planning. However, in order to properly explore and exploit these data, citizens need intuitive and effective ways of interacting with it. This paper presents CityOnStats, a visualisation tool developed to provide users, mainly adults and young adults, with a game-like 3D environment populated with air quality sensing data, as an alternative to the traditionally passive visualisation techniques. CityOnStats provides several visual cues of pollution presence with the purpose of meeting each user’s preferences. Usability tests with a sample of 30 participants have shown the value of air quality 3D game-based visualisation and have provided empirical support for which visual cues are most adequate for the task at hand.
Highlights
The growth of urban environments brings many benefits to citizens, and contributes to an increase in pollution levels and, as a consequence, to the degradation of air quality
The data gathered by these sensor networks are typically made available to citizens via traditional visualisation techniques based on colour-coded plots (e.g., [6,7]) representing pollutants concentrations and air quality indexes (e.g., [8])
To evaluate CityOnStats a set of tests was conducted with 30 participants, which self-reported as 77 % male and 23 % female, with ages distributed between 17 and 29 years old
Summary
The growth of urban environments brings many benefits to citizens, and contributes to an increase in pollution levels and, as a consequence, to the degradation of air quality. While the aforementioned previous work has already shown its applicability to several applications domains, to the best of our knowledge, no previous work has applied 3D virtual environments for scientific data visualisation in the air quality monitoring domain By filling this gap in this article, we expect to foster the ability of citizens to intuitively access key health-related information when planning their daily routines. Empowered with air quality information, citizens should be able to select health-optimal routes across the city [17] Bearing this motivation in mind, we started the ExpoLIS Project [4,5] with the goal of developing and deploying a sensor network in Lisbon city buses and provide the generated data to citizens via a set of graphical applications.
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