VR System for Spatio-Temporal Visualization of Tweet Data

Social media analysis is helpful to understand the behavior of people. Human behavior in social media is related to time and location, which is often difficult to understand the characteristics appropriately and quickly. We chose to apply virtual reality technologies to visualize the spatio-temporal social media data. This makes us easier to develop interactive and intuitive user interfaces and explore the data as we want. This paper presents our visualization of tweets of microblogs with location information. Our system features a three-dimensional temporal visualization which consists of the two-dimensional map and a time axis. In particular, we aggregate the number of tweets of each coordinate and time step, calculate scores and display them as piled cubes. We highlight only specific cubes so that users can understand the overall tendency of datasets. We also developed user interfaces for operating these cubes and panels which indicate details of tweets.