Designing an Interactive Visualization for Road Works Coordination Using Virtual Reality

Road works highly affect traffic in major cities, therefore coordination is key to avoid congestion on urban streets and highways. Software tools and interactive visualizations giving insight to complex road works data as well as preexisting spatial and temporal dependencies in between sites are important for the coordination process. In existing 2D visualizations, spatio-temporal dependencies are shown in multiple views, resulting in high cognitive load. In this article authors describe the design and evaluation of a visualization using Virtual Reality for exploring multi-dimensional data of road works. The relevance for expert use was reviewed in an interview with local traffic engineers. In addition, a user study was conducted to evaluate the general usability of the prototype. The results reflect an overall positive response and acceptance and show directions for further development.