Topographic building pattern recognition with geospatial OpenStreetMap data

Abstract: This paper aims to explore the perceptual recognition of topographical building patterns from real-world OpenStreetMap data on virtual globes. An implementation was developed in which all geographical and contextual information was layered and, for the purpose of this study, what solely remained were building patterns as viewed from above. This was developed as a module for the planetarium visualization software Uniview. The aim was to determine how cities with different building patterns were perceived by participants in terms of size, scale, and building density. This was measured as the comparative difference between city pairs, that is, how much they differed in the percentage of the area that they covered. Two quantitative studies were conducted, one smaller controlled study with 19 participants and one larger online crowd-sourced study with 72 participants. The results show that participants are generally able to discern building patterns when the comparative difference is greater than a certain critical threshold. This critical threshold was determined to be at approximately 0.5% for both studies and for accuracy levels above 60%. Thus it was concluded that below this critical threshold users should be provided with visual feedback or other means of identifiers in order to allow for definite recognition, depending on what kind of information a certain type of visualization is trying to convey.