Benjamin Kies

Homework 4: Mapping an Indoor Space

Due date: Wed, April 15th at 5pm EST

Part 1: The Place

Describe the Place you will be visualizing, and your reasons for choosing it:
The following visualization is from the shoot-em-up video game Halo 3. I choose a map called Guardian which I enjoy playing on. In the vizualization, I displayed the points from which I most frequently fragged (successfuly killed) my opponents. I chose this visualization because playing Halo is one of my favourite hobbies and I wanted to be able to analyze how I play the game. This visualization is helpful because it lets me see where I normally go during the game, and where I defend and attack best from.

Part 2: Data Collection

The data that I collected involved:

The map itself. This I just found on bungie.net

Data structs that contain the position on the map, and the weapon used.

I then calculated the total kills in each region for all weapons.

I also ended up having to play the game online, take screenshots of the different areas, and then upload the pictures onto my computer.

I emailed bungie.net to get the actual position of each point that I wanted, but they did not reply, so I ended up having to just manually input each point for myself, based on the images on their website. This is unfortunate, since I could have done a much better job if I had the original data.

Part 3: Registering the Locations to your Map

The following is a link to the data file with pixel coordinates of each region, along with the relevant data. I have modified the code given to me to output a file with all the information I need, not only the locations of each region. Here

Part 4: Interact With Your Classmates (40 points)

The following is a link to the actual visualization I created.Here
Note that the dimensions are slightly too big for most webbrowsers. Do get a much better experience with the visualization, open the actual applet included.


The data actually tells an interesting story:

I tend to get the most kills all along the center line of the map, especially in the left and right buildings.

I use the sniper rifle the most from the building on the right.

My favourite weapons are the shotgun and the frag grenade. I tend to dominate with the shotgun in the south regions of the map, while I dominate with grenades everywhere else.

The following outlines my design decision:

I chose to have a black plain background for aesthetic value, as well as simplicity

I decided to use pie charts to give a brief synopsis of different weapon usage at every region on the map, but if users click on a point on the map, a bar chart will show up, which gives the statistics in much more detail. This allows the user to get a good idea of distributions across the map, but still get accurate data if they so wish.

I used color to distinguish between weapon types, because it is nominal data

I used circle size to show total kills in each area - although this is not a very accurate measure, the users only need to use the circles for comparison on the map - once they have compared different areas, they can get a much more detailed view of the kills by moving the cursor over that area.

Finally, I included a minimum circle size, so that areas with very few kills would still show up big enough to see the pie distribution. This does make some data points seem bigger than they actually are, but these points are the smallest ones on the map, and hence do not matter as much, so I decided it was worth the sacrifice of accuracy.