Trail Visualization: A Novel System for Monitoring Hiking Trails

University of Michigan School of Information, SI 649 ~ Information VisualizationZhenan Hong, Sangmi Park, Jessamyn Smallenburg, Gary Suen

Abstract

We describe an information visualization system to visualize and track individuals walking on hiking trails. Our modeldevelops an identity as a unique system through comparison with related work, including research into userrequirements specific to hiking. We emphasize safety as it pertains to hiking on trails classified as arduous, and developa use-case scenario built around a particularly strenuous hiking trail in Yosemite National Park. Our target audience forthe scope of this project consists of individuals we refer to as

“savers,” park officials skilled in both the use of intuitive

and usable visualization interfaces and rescue tactics in the wilderness. We demonstrate the development of ourthinking processes, and we illustrate the stages of interface design using screen shots. We indicate how systemevaluation was conducted, and discuss our system in the context of different visualization concepts. We addressalternatives that we considered, and conclude with a section on possible future developments.

Keywords

: Information Visualization, Contextual Awareness System, Mobile Computing, Interactive Visualization, Hiker,Environmental Monitoring System, Rescue and Safety Tools

Introduction

We built a system to help monitor users' activitiesoutdoors, particularly in mountainous areas.The systemdisplays information including trail records, travellingspeed, ambient light intensity, current weatherconditions, and weather forecast (see prototype figurebelow).The intended target audience consists of

people whom we are calling “savers.”

These individualsmonitor the hiking routes of people out trekking in thefield, while collecting data about both the person andthe contextual surroundings from a smart phone. Thesavers can communicate with hikers about safety andprecautionary data, such as flood warnings and rockslides, and they can help guide the hikers back to theappropriate trail should they wander off into thewilderness. They can also contact other park officialsmonitoring specific trails, should the individuals withthe phones either choose not to answer, be incapableof answering, or be immersed in the crowdedenvironment and unaware that someone is trying tocontact them via telephone.With information thesystem provides,savers gain an understanding of thepast and current positions of the hikers and contextualinformation

Literature Review

The concept behind our system

–

that the target usersare trail

monitors

–

is novel, to the best of ourknowledge. We have conducted literature searches onthe topics of hiking and information visualization, hikingtrail and safety visualizations, travel safety andinformation visualization, and the different uses of maps in information visualization. We did not identifyany other system that is designed to collect the samecombinations of data for a visualization intended to beviewed by people

–

savers

–

who may be monitoringthe trails for safety and protection purposes. Oursystem is intended to represent map, terrain, andsatellite ground data, current and forecasted weatherdata, sunrise/sunset times, ambient light intensity, and

hikers’ contextual data, includin

g current and past traillocation, speed, acceleration, direction, andorientation. Unlike other visualizations associated withmountaineering, our Trail Visualization system collectsall of the above-mentioned data and conveys it to atrained set of savers, individuals who take on theresponsibility of watching out for the safety of others.The intended audience, which in our scenario consistsof park rangers, park rescue personnel, and possibly theconcerned family members, is quite distinct from theintended audience that is most often addressed byother visualization projects. The target audience oftenconsists of the hikers themselves, who access thevisualizations locally on mobile phones, and frequentlyfor the purpose of gathering tourist information aboutarea highlights and attractions. Other outdoorpurposes include general map handling, basicnavigation, and communication. For example, recentresearch into the visualization of geo-information hasprioritized tourism to be the driving motivation behindthe development of geographic informationvisualization. Because tourism information is mostlygeo-information, tourism companies are exploringvisualization strategies that maximize the promotionalappeal of their regions and assets, particularly uniquescenery and thenatural environment.

Otherresearchers have addressed the use of geographicalvisualizations for planning hikes.

Specifically, in theresearch study reported in [2], Bleisch et al. tested theusefulness of a 3-D visualization for planning hikes in

2the foothills of the Swiss Alps. Nivala et al.

conductedresearch into user requirements for location-basedservices to support hiking activities. The hypothesis wasthat hikers should benefit from location-basedinformation that would support communication andsocial behavior needs. The goal of this particular studywas to define user requirements regarding geospatialand other location-based information, focusing on theneeds of hikers. Of the nine user requirementsidentified, one was 'Emergency Situations,' and asecond was 'Saving Experiences.' Slocum et al.researched cognitive and usability issues ingeovisualization.

These authors argue that bothcognitive and

usability issues should be considered inthe context of six primary themes: geospatial virtualenvironments, dynamic representations (includinganimated and interactive maps), metaphors andschemata in user interface design, key individual andgroup differences, collaborative geovisualization, andthe evaluation of the effectiveness of geovisualizationmethods. The authors acknowledge that applyingusability engineering to geovisualization has potential tobe problematic because of the difficulties involved indefining the nature of users and their tasks. In thiswork, we have taken extra care to clearly and preciselyidentify our target user base: the savers.

System Architecture

The system consists of three parts, as illustrated inFigure 1, below. The parts are a mobile client forcapturing sensor data, a middle-ware system to transfersensor data, and a console application to monitorhikers' activities and their contextual surroundings. As

Figure 1

: System Architecture

mobile technology becomes increasingly pervasive,computing is embedded into our everyday lives.Without the need for special tracking devices, we cancollect mobile users' data simply by installingapplications on their mobile phones. In our project, wedeveloped a probe application on the Android platformusing JAVA, and installed it in a Nexus One smart phone.When a hiker turns on the application, it runs in thebackground, automatically capturing live sensor datawith accelerometer and orientation sensors stored inthe phone. Collected data is stored in XML format and istransmitted on a continuous basis from the phone tothe remote server. The server is a black-box systemthat retrieves sensor data from the Nexus phone, andthen sends it to our Trail Visualization consoleapplication. The server then maintains users'identification information, as well as additionalapplications capable of making queries to retrieve datafrom specific users. In this fashion, it makes the systemscalable, with the capability to support multiple mobilephone users in the future.The visualization consolewas built in dashboard style. The low- and high-fidelityprototype visualization interfaces are shown below, asis an image of the visualization in its final format.Forthe implementation, we used JSP + Java to make thesystem. JAVA was used for the back-end of the systemto retrieve sensor data remotely from mobile phones.JSP was used for the front-

end of the system’s

visualization. Here, we also used JavaScript libraries tohelp with the visualization, for example, Protovis andthe Google Map API.

Iterative Design Process

Figure 2 (below) is our high-fidelity prototype, whichconsists of a satellite image from Google Earth depictingthe Glacier Point hike to the top of Half Dome in

Figure 2:

Google Earth trail map of Half Dome Hike.Larger screen is shown at end of paper.

Yosemite National Park, California, U.S.A. Thisdestination was selected both because as a group wepossess familiarity with the layout of the park, andbecause this particular trail is known to be long,arduous, and challenging. Dangers abound on long,strenuous hikes, and this sort of challenging situation isthe type for which we are designing this system. Thestarting point of this trail is in the lower-left, displayed

3as a blue bubble with a star in the middle. Similarly, theend point, on top of Half Dome, is also marked with ablue bubble containing a star. The hiker, shown on themap in blue, is working his way down the trail in thisview. The data on the right are, from top to bottom,speed and acceleration, ambient light, a timeline sliderto retrieve recent data, and a weather display both forthe conditions throughout the day, and the six dayweather forecast.

Scoping and Implementation

The

scope of our project consists of the system’s

successful working functionality through theimplementation of its architectural features. Thearchitecture consists of the collection of real-timedynamic data via the built-in sensors, and its displaythrough the interface of the visualization we havedeveloped. The entire architecture of our system hasbeen successfully deployed. The mobile and desktopclients work together with the server to pass data backand forth. We are currently able to collect live sensordata from our device. The motion, direction, andorientation information associated with the individualholding the phone with live sensors has beensuccessfully visualized through the structure of ourinterface. We also collect terrain and route data fromGoogle Maps. The sensors collect data on acceleration,orientation, light intensity, GPS readings, and weatherand forecast data, all of which are updated on acontinuous basis.We made the ambient light console interface usingProtovis. In order to catch the saver's attention, weused multiple retinal elements to encode the variablesthat represent the light intensity. First of all, the size of the bubbles indicates degree of intensity. Thepositioning of the bubbles spatially references the lightintensity (bubbles in higher position represent higherlight intensity). To make our system more accessible

Figure 3:

Final Visualization Interface. Larger screen shown at end.

and to facilitate pre-attentive processing, we used colorencoding as a metaphor to represent the temperatureof the light. A higher degree of light intensity is encodedwith a warmer color (i.e. red), otherwise in a coldercolor (i.e. blue). For the motion monitoring feature, weused the accelerometer sensor from the Nexus Onesmart phone to collect contextual data from the hiker.The data are then transformed to the visualization andclearly displayed on the accelerometer panel on theright side of the application, just below the lightintensity graph. We used three different colors toencode the hi

ker’s movement, specifically

the threebasic RGB colors

–

red, green and blue

–

to representthe movement variables, because their hue values canbe easily distinguished. We assigned blue to the

hiker’s

left and right movements, green to forward andbackward motions, and red as up and downmovements. In the motion, or movement panel, weembedded a 2D coordinate plane that displays motiondata in occurring in a 3D field. The x- and y-axis valuesvary across the x-axis in the first and fourth coordinateregions, where the x-axis values represent time and they-axis values represent the sequences of dataassociated with the directional movements of the hiker.Left/right movement is coded in blue, with positive

values indicating the hiker’s movements to the left and

negative values clearly indicating movement to theright. Directional motion data are displayed as linearcurves, which helps savers to monitor hikers

’

currentand past movements. The visualization also clearlyshows when the hiker is moving backward or fallingdown, as the value for these two variables wouldbecome negative. The change can be easily observedwhen the curve goes down below the x-axis in thecoordinate plane. By combining continuous curves,colors, and divisions in the visualization for motionmonitoring, capabilities for pre-attentive processing andminimization of degree of focus are enhanced. For thelocation tracing feature, we used a GPS system in theNexus One smart phone. With this, we could get thehiker's current coordinate location (i.e. latitude andlongitude). The system can also display

a hiker’s

position and trail on the map, so that savers can easilytell where the hiker went and how far the hiker hasalready walked.To create the weather component, we used Java toparse XML files from Yahoo weather RSS andWunderground data feeds, and created the weathertable with the data in HTML format. We decided to usethese specific APIs because both are prominently usedon sites such as Google, the Weather Channel, andYahoo. To get the data from both APIs, we queried the