Navigating the future of tsunami risk communication: using dimensionality, interactivity and situatedness to interface with society

Two-dimensional paper maps are well-established tsunami risk communication tools in coastal communities. Advances in GIS, geovisualization and spatial interface technologies suggest new opportunities to deliver tsunami risk communication using 3D, interactive and situated risk visualization. This paper introduces a set of geovisual interface constructs—dimensionality–interactivity–situatedness (DIS)—and evaluates their presence, absence and distribution in 129 examples of existing academic and public visual tsunami risk communication. The resulting analyses reveal structural differences in the distributions of DIS found in each of academic and public risk communication literatures, and opportunities for interactive location-aware risk communication. The second half of this paper reports on three new tsunami risk visualization interfaces informed by and developed to demonstrate how we might explore new undeveloped risk communication territory revealed by the DIS cube analysis. We discuss the design, rationale and implications of: EvacMap; ARRO3D; and Tsunamulator. These risk visualization interfaces deliver location-aware, user-centred risk maps, as well as virtual risk maps and tsunami simulations that can be viewed while standing in situ in coastal environments. This work is a first step intended to help the risk communication community systematically engage an emerging territory of interactive and location-aware 3D visualizations. This work aims to facilitate and encourage progress towards developing a new strand of interactive, situated geovisual risk communication research, by establishing these guiding constructs, their relationship to existing works and how they may inform the design of future systems and usability research. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015