Animation for Time-oriented Data: An Overview of Empirical Research

The usage of visualizations to aid the analysis of time oriented data plays an important role in various fields of applications. The need to visualize such data was decisive for the development of different visualization techniques over the last years. One of the frequently applied techniques is animation in order to illustrate the movements in such a way to make changes in the data transparent. However, evaluation studies of such animated interfaces for time-oriented data with potential users are still difficult to find. In this paper, we present our observations based on a systematic literature review with the motivation to support researchers and designers to identify future directions for their research. The literature review is split in two parts: (1) research on animation from the field of psychology, and (2) evaluation studies with the focus on animation of time-oriented data.