Human Interaction with Animated Maps : The portrayal of the passage of time

Methods for interactive map animations are still in an early stage compared to more traditional cartography, and the potentials for improvements are significant. This paper focuses on better design for map animations, particularly for the portrayal of the information regarding the temporal dimension. A series of animations are presented and discussed and subsequently introduced to a wider group of people. In the responses from this group it was not possible to show any significant difference in how well people respond to the different animations, nevertheless people do have preferences for certain animation types depending on which time-scale they represent.