Better Communication of COVID-19 Trends through 3D Visualization

加拿大各地政府鼓励全体加拿大人大幅改变日常生活方式，以控制新冠病毒的传播。然而，宣传这些措施的必要性是一项挑战，因为这些变化对人们的生活产生巨大影响。因此，社区必须了解为什么地区政府正在采取这些措施，这需要研究人员、加拿大和省政府、卫生当局和公众之间更好和有效的沟通。然而，COVID-19病例的迅速增加和广泛变化使得以易于理解的方式传达信息具有挑战性。可视化这些数据的具体挑战是，许多潜在趋势本质上是指数型的。向公众解释这些趋势是具有挑战性的；人们可能没有注意到显示案例数量的线性可视化和对数可视化之间的根本区别，或者他们可能无法正确解释数据。因此，需要对COVID-19趋势进行简单、有效、易于理解的数据可视化，使公众能够理解和关注形势的重要性。此外，我们不了解以前关于普通人群对COVID-19数据可视化的反应的工作，我们需要确定良好的方法来吸引人们对这方面的关注。在这个项目中，我们计划调查人们如何应对现有的COVID-19数据可视化方法，以及他们的反应如何随着新的可视化方法和技术而变化。我们建议使用新颖的3D可视化方法，并比较2D和3D可视化方法对可视化COVID-19数据对人群的影响。通过将所有这些研究成果应用于虚拟、增强、混合现实等不同平台，我们希望提高COVID-19传播的有效性。有了这样的沟通，就更容易鼓励民众遵守佩戴口罩等措施，并继续限制集会规模。

The whole Canadian population was encouraged by regional governments to change their daily lifestyle significantly to control the spread of the COVID-19 virus. Yet, communicating the need for such measures is a challenge, because these changes have an enormous impact on people's lives. Thus, the community has to be informed about why regional governments are taking these measures, which requires better and effective communication between researchers, the Canadian and provincial governments, health authorities, and the public. However, the rapid increase and widely varying change in COVID-19 cases makes it challenging to convey the messages in a way that is easy to understand. The specific challenge in visualizing such data is that many of the underlying trends are exponential in nature. Explaining such trends to the general public is challenging; people may not notice the fundamental difference between linear and logarithmic visualizations to show the number of cases, or they might not interpret the data correctly. Thus, there is a need for simple, effective, and easy-to-understand data visualization for COVID-19 trends, which enables the public to understand and focus on the importance of the situation. Also, we are not aware on previous work on the response of the general population to COVID-19 data visualizations, and we need to identify good approaches to attract people's attention for this context. In this project, we are planning to investigate how people respond to existing COVID-19 data visualization methods and how their reaction changes with novel visualization methods and techniques. We propose to use novel 3D visualisation approaches and to also compare the impact of 2D and 3D visualisation methods to visualize COVID-19 data on the population. By applying all these research outcomes to application on different platforms, including Virtual, Augmented, Mixed Reality, we want to increase the effectiveness of COVID-19 communication. With such communication, it will be easier to encourage the population to comply with measures, such as wearing facemasks and to continue to limit the size of gatherings.