Integration of 3D Data and Text: The Effects of Text Positioning, Connectivity, and Visual Hints on Comprehension

3D computer graphic models hold much promise as illustrations that can be interactively explored. These 3D illustrations often need to be linked to labels, annotations and sometimes more lengthy textual explanations. Achieving effective integration of the 3D illustration and its textual information is a difficult task and has resulted in a variety of proposed approaches. However, the comparative effectiveness of these approaches has not been studied. To address this issue, we have conducted a study in which we have compared methods of associating text with its 3D model: attaching the text directly to the object, placing the text in the object’s shadow, using symbols to make the correlation between the object and the text, and using a line to make the visual connection from the text to the object with and without additional hints in the shadow. During the first part we were interested in whether a graphical method can clarify the correlation between a part of the 3D model and its associated text. The second part focused on whether the text remains comprehensible during a scene exploration. Based on our results, we suggest design implications for developing interactive 3D illustrations.