Living Globe: Tridimensional Interactive Visualization of World Demographic Data

This paper presents Living Globe, an application for visualization of demographic data supporting the temporal comparison of data from several countries represented on a 3D globe. Living Globe allows the visual exploration of the following demographic data: total population, population density and growth, crude birth and death rates, life expectancy, net migration and population percentage of different age groups. While offering unexperienced users a default mapping of these data variables into visual variables, Living Globe allows more advanced users to select the mapping, increasing its flexibility. The main aspects of the Living Globe model and prototype are described as well as the evaluation results obtained using heuristic evaluation and usability testing. Some conclusions and ideas for future work are also presented.