TimeBender: Interactive Authoring of 3D Space-Time Narratives

Abstract

Communication of scientific results and discoveries to, for example, fellow domain experts, business partners, students, or the general public, is an important part of research. Communication through visualization has been proven to be effective when the representations are memorable and engaging, and research has shown that these communicative visualizations can be further enhanced with narratives for certain audiences. A challenge faced by scientists is to create memorable and engaging visualizations for communication which traditionally has been done by trained illustrators and designers. Therefore, we created TimeBender, a framework and prototype implementation to bridge this gap specifically for authoring narrative posters in a 3D environment with a space-time dimension. The posters feature multiple scenes forming the narrative, which are connected by an elongated object encoding the narrative flow. We demonstrate that our approach is capable of aiding the authoring of these posters through a 3-step pipeline where, first, the scenes are set up individually, then, the global layout of scenes in the poster space is determined, before details, such as textual elements, are added. TimeBender supports animation as each scene is rendered dynamically within the poster. The framework and example results were evaluated in an expert interview with a professional illustrator.