Animating Cartogram Using Physical Simulation

Revealing the dynamic changes of data using the cartogram is a noticeable visualization technique in thematic map.We present a physical simulation based cartogram animation method to solve the region overlapping problem of traditional interpolation animation methods.Our method first extracts key frames of cartogram animation using map deformation algorithm,then establishes a mass-spring model for the cartogram and solves the spacetime constraint problem with respect to the key frames.Comparing with the spline interpolation method,our method avoids the time-consuming trial-and-error process and generates animations with no region overlapping problem.Experiments and user study show that our method generates more natural animation and better information expressiveness than existing cartogram animation methods.