Metro Transit-Centric Visualization for City Tour Planning

Abstract

In general, city trip planning consists of two main steps: knowing Points-Of-Interest (POIs), and then planning a tour route from the current point to next preferred POIs. We mainly consider the metro for traveling around touristic cities as the main means of transportation. In this context, existing tools lack a capability to effectively visualize POIs on the metro map for trip planning. To bridge this gap, we propose an interactive framework that holistically combines presentations of POIs and a metro network. Our idea is to identify popular POIs based on visual worth computation, and to introduce POI discovery for effectively identifying POIs within reach of a metro network for users. We use octilinear layouts to highlight the metro network, and show representative POI images in the layout space visualized within a user-specified viewing window. We have implemented our working prototype showing touristic cities with a metro network. We have factored out various design guidelines that are basis for designing our method, and validated our approach with a user study surveying 70 individuals.