The Role of Map Animation for Geographic Visualization

Many of today's significant research challenges, such as resource management and environmental monitoring, depend upon capturing, analysing and representing dynamic geographic processes. The ability to recognize and track changes in complex physical systems is essential to developing an understanding of how these systems work (Yattaw, 1999). For thousands of years cartographers have been perfecting the representation of dynamic spatiotemporal phenomena with static, spatial representations in the form of two-dimensional maps (Bertin, 1983). As early as the 1930s, cartographers also experimented with adding the time dimension to congruently representing dynamic geographic processes with animated map displays. Dynamic cartographic representations, such as cartographic movies (Tobler, 1970), twoand three-dimensional computer animations (Moellering, 1976, 1980), as well as interactive map animations and simulations, have become increasingly popular since personal computers with growing graphic-processing power have become cheaper, faster and more user-friendly (Peterson, 1995). Even though real-time three-dimensional landscape fly-throughs and interactive map animations of various spatial diffusion processes have become widespread with dissemination through the Internet, it still seems that the cartographic community has only been scratching the surface of dynamic displays (Campbell and Egbert, 1990; Fabrikant and Josselin, 2003) and there is the very real risk that mapping technology is outpacing cartographic theory. This chapter explores the role of animation in geographic visualization and outlines the challenges, both conceptual and technical, in the creation and use of animated maps today.