Information Legibility in 3D Information Visualisation: Navigation aids to assist information finding

Information visualisation (IV) involves representing information visually as a mean of getting insight into data. Many techniques are available in visualising information, with city/urban planning as one of them. The challenge that lies with city/urban planning technique in Information Visualisation is how to enhance the information legibility as to assist users in their wayfinding task. Universiti Malaya (UM) campus is used as the subject domain to study the efficiency of the city visualisation method applied to 3D virtual environment. Few navigation aids have been identified and incorporated into the visualised virtual environment, and the effectiveness of these navigation aids in helping users finding information in the 3D virtual environment, by means of navigating within it is investigated. The result from the experiments conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of information finding using suggested navigation aids shows that all the participants have successfully locate the required information in less than one minute compared to 5 – 10 minutes without the navigation aids.