LandSAR: Visceralizing Landslide Data for Enhanced Situational Awareness in Immersive Analytics
This work addresses the problem of cognitive gaps in landslide analysis for safety analysts, though it is incremental as it builds on existing immersive analytics with tangible interfaces.
The paper tackles the challenge of analyzing complex landslide simulation data by developing LandSAR, an immersive analytics system that visceralizes data through integrated simulations and visualizations, resulting in improved situational awareness and engagement as demonstrated in expert evaluations.
Landslides pose a significant threat to public safety, but their dynamic processes are difficult to analyze from post-event observation alone. Computational simulation is therefore essential, but it generates vast, abstract datasets that create a cognitive gap between the analyst and the real-world, physical terrain. While Immersive Analytics (IA) begins to bridge this gap by visualizing data in 3D, we explore how these systems evolve beyond abstract data and integrate data visceralization to enhance Situational Awareness (SA). We present LandSAR, an immersive analytics system that enhances SA for landslide analysis by visceralizing landslide data through integrated simulations and visualizations. LandSAR supports real-time simulations of landslide dynamics, prevention strategies, and climate impacts, enabling multi-perspective what-if analyses. The system uses 3D-printed terrain models as tangible interfaces to facilitate haptic feedback and enable gesture-based exploration, allowing for intuitive geographical perception. Expert interviews and workshops demonstrate that LandSAR effectively improves SA and engagement.