Zdeněk Stachoň

• Ph.D.
• Masaryk University

Virtual reality (VR) technology has become increasingly popular in education as a tool for enhancing learning experiences and engagement. This paper addresses the lack of a suitable tool for creating multi‐user immersive educational content for virtual environments by introducing a novel solution called eDIVE. The solution is designed to facilitate...

This article investigates cross-cultural differences in analytic/holistic cognitive styles among participants from 11 countries: Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Ghana, Philippines, Slovakia, Taiwan, and Türkiye. Using a preregistered design, 993 university students were assessed with three perceptual tasks based on Navon’s h...

In an applied research project, we aim to bolster fully remote higher education with collaborative immersive virtualenvironments (CIVE). Distance learning faces challenges like high dropout rates, often due to student isolation. Whilesome universities offer physical campuses, they don't resolve geographic isolation. Our solution leverages CIVE,allo...

Investigating the geometric level of detail and the visual level of realism, the study examines the effect of level of detail on users' perceptions of 3D visualizations in an experiment that employs textures to render building facades. The effects of level of detail and level of realism are explored by testing users with four variations of the same...

This book comprehensively explores immersive virtual reality (iVR) in educational settings. The beginning of the book sets out in detail the objectives of the “Education in Collaborative Immersive Virtual Environment” (EduINCIVE) project. It emphasises the development of the eDIVE platform, designed for collaborative education in immersive virtual...

When spatial information is depicted on univariate or multivariate maps, different visualization designs should be considered to fit the designs to suit the target audience and define the map’s general purpose and therefore also the map user’s expected cognitive processes. Although multivariate maps have attracted research for decades, only several...

We examined theories of cross‑cultural differences in cognitive style on a sample of 242 participantsrepresenting five cultural groups (Czechia, Ghana, eastern and western Turkey, and Taiwan). Theexperiment involved immersive virtual environments consisting of two salient focal objects and acomplex background as stimuli, which were presented using...

This eye-tracking research investigates cross-cultural similarities and differences in visual attention in complex scenes free-viewing perception. The study utilizes 70 real-world photos with one or two focal objects as stimulus materials. The study examines the amount of time spent on focal objects, saccadic lengths, temporal changes in saccadic l...

This paper investigates cross-cultural differences in analytic/holistic cognitive styles among participants from eleven countries: Armenia, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czechia, Germany, Ghana, Philippines, Slovakia, Taiwan, and Türkiye. Using a pre-registered design, 993 university students were assessed with three perceptual tasks based on Navon...

This article provides a comprehensive framework for CIVE (Collaborative Immersive Virtual Environment) education, encompassing educational lessons and methods and the eDIVE platform, an original software solution designed for formal and non-formal education. Such a holistic and complex approach was employed to bring the actual implementation of CIV...

Digital technology has shaped the way humans interact with information and create knowledge. These conditions have in turn shaped a generation of people who experienced virtual environments very early in their lives and are often referred to as digital natives. This group of people has a particular way of communicating and interacting. It character...

This book comprehensively explores immersive virtual reality (iVR) in educational settings. The beginning of the book sets out in detail the objectives of the “Education in Collaborative Immersive Virtual Environment” (EduINCIVE) project. It emphasises the development of the eDIVE platform, designed for collaborative education in immersive virtual...

Many university-taught courses moved to online form since the outbreak of the global pandemic of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). Distance learning has become broadly used as a result of the widely applied lockdowns, however, many students lack personal contact in the learning process. A classical web-based distance learning does not provide means f...

The study evaluated the degree of comparability of human behaviour exhibited during an evacuation scenario conducted in two environments, one real and the other virtual. For this purpose, we created a precise 3D model (digital twin) of a real campus building. In both the experimental (virtual environment) and control (real environment) groups, the...

The royal charters and chronicles present a unique historical source for researching power distribution and administration of the medieval kingdom. This paper presents an attempt to progress in the analytical approaches presented by German historians from the 1980s and 1990s to study the governance of the medieval kingdom. Inspired by the use of ne...

The presented study aspires to utilize the gradually validated immense potential of collaborative immersive virtual environments (CIVEs) in higher education when designing and conducting geography lessons. These particular lessons focused on hypsography. A Research through Design approach and relevant qualitative methodology were used as we engaged...

Landmark‐based pedestrian navigation can assist pedestrians in navigating successfully. Previous studies have investigated the factors affecting the cognitive efficiency of landmark visualization in terms of both the visual salience of landmarks and the personal characteristics of users. However, empirical studies and applications that consider the...

From the user perspective, 3D geospatial data visualizations are one of the bridges between the physical and the digital world. As such, the potential of 3D geospatial data visualizations is frequently discussed within and beyond the digital twins. The effects on human cognitive processes in complex spatial tasks is rather poorly known. No uniform...

The growing use of geographic information systems (GIS) and geographical analyses in different areasof the digital humanities highlights the need for geocoding, i.e. assigning geographic coordinates torecords in a dataset. Such spatially-referenced datasets are a precondition for any spatial analysis andvisualization. While GIS in general is a dyna...

During evacuation, individual navigation behavior is often dictated by the legibility of evacuation signs and the environmental setting itself. People tend to follow previously-used and known routes (to retrace) rather than follow evacuation signage. This has proven undesirable, even fatal, in emergencies and such behavior calls for a better unders...

The aim of this study was to compare the performance of two bivariate visualizations by measuring response correctness (error rate) and response time, and to identify the differences in cognitive processes involved in map-reading tasks by using eye-tracking methods. The present study is based on our previous research and the hypothesis that the use...

What are the reasons and motivation for virtual reconstruction of buildings? What are the possibilities of current-generation 3D visualization in the context of (re)constructing buildings, especially historical monuments, and how can it be utilized in regional development? Such questions are presented and discussed in the article. The following tex...

In this study, we focus on the usability of pseudo-3D thematic maps (static perspective views) compared with their conventional 2D equivalents. A total of 105 study participants were divided into two groups (12-19 years old and 20-27 years old). A Perspective Taking Test measured their spatial abilities and each participant solved 15 tasks using fo...

This article presents and offers Toggle Toolkit, which is an original collection of Unity scripts designed to control various aspects of interactive 3D experiments. The toolkit enables researchers in different fields to design, conduct and evaluate experiments and include interactive elements in immersive virtual environments. This was achieved by...

A virtual environment (VE) is a 3D computer-based simulation of a real or imagined environment in which users can navigate and interactive with virtual objects. VEs have found popular use in communicating geographic information for a variety of domain applications. This entry begins with a brief history of virtual and immersive environments and an...

This manuscript identifies and documents unsolved problems and research challenges in the extended reality (XR) domain (i.e., virtual (VR), augmented (AR), and mixed reality (MR)). The manuscript is structured to include technology, design, and human factor perspectives. The text is visualization/display-focused, that is, other modalities such as a...

The paper aims for the contemporary strategic development of the Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) area defined by the U.N. DRR conference in Sendai, 2015, and other related conferences like the 2017 Global Platform in Cancun. There are also highlighted U.N. Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) 2015-2030. DRR Sendai framework is inextricably linked wit...

The theory of holistic and analytic cognitive style is currently one of the most prominent theories with the ambition to describe and explain cross-cultural differences in perception and cognition. This paper is focused on four newly adapted methods of cognitive style measurement trying to establish convergent validity of these methods with already...

The use of 3D visualization technologies has increased rapidly in many applied fields, including geovisualization, and has been researched from many different perspectives. However, the findings for the benefits of 3D visualization, especially in stereoscopic 3D forms, remain inconclusive and disputed. Stereoscopic “real” 3D visualization was propo...

The article examines cross-cultural differences encountered in the cognitive processing of specific cartographic stimuli. We conducted a comparative experimental study on 98 participants from two different cultures, the first group comprising Czechs (N = 53) and the second group comprising Chinese (N = 22) and Taiwanese (N = 23). The findings sugge...

Stimuli for CMMS (Categorization of Multivariate Map Symbols) methods are available at: https://osf.io/urzg3/

The theoretical research in cartography was recently boosted mostly by technological development, which enables the comfortable usage of various new and even traditional methodological approaches. For example, the Eye-tracking method can possibly provide deep insight into the process of map reading, especially in the case of simple tasks. The visua...

Experimental designs are always limited by the possibilities of technological solutions used for data collection. This paper aims at presenting hardware and software solution for eye-tracking implemented in an immersive virtual reality device, which was designed for the purpose of a cross-cultural study. This study focuses on differences in visual...

The paper presents a concept of an experimental design and its statistical analysis. The objective of the experiment is to examine cognitive processing of various cartographic visualizations in regard to an individual’s cognitive style. In cartography, alternative methods may be used to represent data. In our study, two forms of representation of b...

This chapter describes the state-of-the-art of the potential of Digital Earth for progressively better solutions for disaster mitigation. The chapter illustrates the use of strong Digital Earth tools for data sharing and important potential for users, such as 2D or multi-D visualizations. Milestones of developments in early warning, disaster risk m...

The poster presents an exploratory research of eye-tracking results conducted on 37 Czech participants. The poster introduces unique cartographic stimuli which are characterized by the categorizing (clustering) of multivariate point symbols in the fictional cartographic maps with preselected analytic/holistic areas created with respect to analytic/...

Navigation in a complex indoor environment can be difficult, and pedestrians may find themselves disoriented. As the featured objects of an environment, indoor landmarks play an important role in navigation. A review of the existing literature in outdoor landmark evaluation methods, however, shows that they cannot be fully applicable in any indoor...

With the increasing number of large buildings and more frequent indoor activities, indoor location-based service has expanded. Due to the complicated internal passages of large public buildings and the three-dimensional interlacing, it is difficult for users to quickly reach the destination, the demand of indoor paths visualization increases. Isikd...

The issue of uncertainty as a generic phenomenon in the natural world has been at the centre of both the cartographic and GI communities since the beginning of geographic data quality research. In accordance with the development of theoretical aspects of cartographic visualization and methods of uncertainty propagation in models, the generally acce...

An increasing number of population brings increasing vulnerability of the society to different disasters and emergencies. The maps provide spatial information, which is useful on different levels of decision making during emergencies from strategic planning to single person decision making. To fit the user needs maps can be optimized for a particul...

Landmarks play an important role in navigation especially when people in the familiar and unfamiliar environment. These landmarks are usually used for expressing their spatial knowledge. This prior knowledge is related to the spatial familiarity that the spatial knowledge is acquired by individuals as a function of their experience in the environme...

Navigation in a complex indoor environment can be difficult, and pedestrians may find themselves disoriented. As the featured objects of an environment, indoor landmarks play an important role in navigation. A review of the existing literature in outdoor landmark evaluation methods, however, shows that they cannot be fully applicable in any indoor...

This study presents surface mass balance of two small glaciers on James Ross Island calculated using constant and zonally-variable conversion factors. The density of 500 and 900 kg·m-3 adopted for snow in the accumulation area and ice in the ablation area, respectively, provides lower mass balance values that better fit to the glaciological records...

This work addresses the impact of a geovisualization’s level of realism on a user’s experience in indoor navigation. The key part of the work is a user study in which participants navigated along a designated evacuation route previously learnt in a virtual tour or traditional 2D floor plan. The efficiency and effectiveness of completing the task wa...

Featured Application Methods of analyzing user behavior in virtual environments, such as spatial movement and interaction patterns in individuals or within groups, user interface usage. Abstract Human performance and navigation activity in virtual environments can be measured and assessed with the aim to draw specific conclusions about human cogni...

Immersive virtual reality (iVR) devices are rapidly becoming an important part of our lives and forming a new way for people to interact with computers and each other. The impact and consequences of this innovative technology have not yet been satisfactory explored. This empirical study investigated the cognitive and social aspects of collaboration...

This paper examines the possibilities and benefits of spatial visual analysis in exploring and answering a hypothesis proposed in a historical study of religions. The content was based on the GEHIR project, which studies the history of ancient Graeco-Roman religions using innovative methods applied in the study of complex systems. The first part of...

The form of visual representation affects both the way in which the visual representation is processed and the effectiveness of this processing. Different forms of visual representation may require the employment of different cognitive strategies in order to solve a particular task; at the same time, the different representations vary as to the ext...

Population distribution modelling can benefit many different domains, for example, transportation, urban planning, ecology or emergency management. Information about the location and number of people in an affected area is crucial for decision-makers during emergencies and crises. Mobile phone data represents relatively reliable and time accurate i...

This paper deals with the issue of the perceptual aspects of selected graphic variables (specifically shape and size) and map background in cartographic visualization. The continued experimental study is based on previous findings and the presupposed cross-cultural universality of shape and size as a graphic variable. The results bring a new perspe...

Interactive 3D visualizations of geospatial data are currently available and popular through various applications such as Google EarthTM and others. Several studies have focused on user performance with 3D maps, but static 3D maps were mostly used as stimuli. The main objective of this paper was to identify differences between interactive and stati...

Various widely available applications such as Google Earth have made interactive 3D visualizations of spatial data popular. While several studies have focused on how users perform when interacting with these with 3D visualizations, it has not been common to record their virtual movements in 3D environments or interactions with 3D maps. We therefore...

The use of touch displays and 3D visualization are both increasing. Devices with touch displays are used daily, especially by the younger generation, who are also known as digital natives. This paper examines a comparison between digital natives and adults (so-called digital immigrants). We created a pilot user experiment (within-subject design, tw...

The huge technological leap in recent years brought extensive possibilities of hypotheses testing in immersive virtual environments (VE) and geovisualizations. Traditional research standards require well controlled experiments with strict setting to bring valid data about human behaviour. Unfortunately, such experiments testify in a limited way abo...

The use of Virtual Reality (VR) in general and virtual geographic environments (VGEs) in particular is becoming more and more common. However, the use and usability of traditional graphical variables within such environments is still rather unclear. Our research is based on a review of studies about the three-dimensional spatial visualization. We p...

This article reports on an empirical study investigating cultural differences in the visuospatial perception and cognition of qualitative point symbols shown on reference maps. We developed two informationally equivalent symbol sets depicted on identical reference maps that were shown to Czech and Chinese map readers. The symbols varied in visual c...

Two small glaciers on James Ross Island, the north-eastern Antarctic Peninsula, experienced surface mass gain between 2009 and 2015 as revealed by field measurements. A positive cumulative surface mass balance of 0.57 ± 0.67 and 0.11 ± 0.37 m w.e. was observed during the 2009–2015 period on Whisky Glacier and Davies Dome, respectively. The results...

The article presents a testing platform named Hypothesis. The software was developed primarily for the purposes of experimental research in cartography and psychological diagnostics. Hypothesis is an event-logger application which can be used for the recording of events and their real-time processing, if needed. The platform allows for the applicat...

Terrain analysis and related spatial tasks are among the most difficult to learn. When analyzing long-term results of admission exams of students at the Department of Geography, Faculty of Science, Masaryk University, it turns out that high school students have great difficulties working with hypsography. Only a small percentage of candidates were...

Three-dimensional geovisualizations are currently pushed both by technological development and by the demands of experts in various applied areas. In the presented empirical study, we compared the features of real 3D (stereoscopic) versus pseudo 3D (monoscopic) geovisualizations in static and interactive digital elevation models. We tested 39 high-...

The main motivation for this study was to enable paragliding pilots to use Augmented Reality features during flight. For orientation in the air, paragliding pilots use a map as the main source of information. It is therefore important that the information is presented in the most easily accessible way. The aim of the present study was to investigat...

This study explores the influence of stereoscopic (real) 3D and monoscopic (pseudo) 3D visualization on the human ability to reckon altitude information in noninteractive and interactive 3D geovisualizations. A two phased experiment was carried out to compare the performance of two groups of participants, one of them using the real 3D and the other...

A drought of exceptional severity took place in Central Europe in 1947, with marked socio-economic consequences and far-reaching political responses in the Czech Lands. A rich body of meteorological observations from the Czech Lands is drawn upon to construct a comprehensive picture of the various direct and indirect factors that led to this extrem...

The use of both 3D visualization and devices with touch displays is increasing. In this paper, we focused on the Web technologies for 3D visualization of spatial data and its interaction via touch screen gestures. At the first stage, we compared the support of touch interaction in selected JavaScript libraries on different hardware (desktop PCs wit...

Oak ring width measurements compiled from 44 sampling sites throughout the territory of the Czech Republic are analysed for the 1655–2013 period. Measurements taken at all these sites are sorted into ten sub-chronologies on the basis of various environmental factors, such as soil moisture (dry/wet), elevation (low/high), age (young/old), species (Q...

The mixed research design is a progressive methodological discourse that combines the advantages of quantitative and qualitative methods. Its possibilities of application are, however, dependent on the efficiency with which the particular research techniques are used and combined. The aim of the paper is to introduce the possible combination of Hyp...

This article addresses the measurement and assessment of response times and error rates in map-reading tasks relative to various modes of linear feature visualization. In a between-subject design study, participants completed a set of map-reading tasks generated by approaches to a traffic problem. These entailed quick and correct decoding of graphi...

The paper presents the interdisciplinary study of cognitive visualisation. The study compares two different methods of visualisation - a common military topographic map and a transport context map. This comparison was regards to cognitive and perceptual load on the user. A mixed research design was elected for the purpose of the study, this design...

The paper is devoted to the topic of reconstructive 3D models. They are very illustrative for presenting knowledge about the historical character and urban development of cities. paper describes creation of a virtual model of the city Brno expressing its appearance at the Swedish siege in 1645. 3D model for two other periods, namely the years 1400...

The origin and nature of seal carcasses scattered around the Ulu Peninsula, James Ross Island, is examined using robust and novel multidisciplinary analysis. Spatial distribution analysis indicates their predominance at low elevations and on surfaces with negligible slope. The seals died throughout the last century. Dental cement increments indicat...

The paper presents the interdisciplinary study of cognitive visualisation. The study compares two different methods of visualisation - a common military topographic map and a transport context map. This comparison was regards to cognitive and perceptual load on the user. A mixed research design was elected for the purpose of the study, this design...

Worldwide map portals have become an important platform for spatial data presentation. These portals attract millions of users every day and rank among the most visited Web sites in the world. For this reason, they have become a subject of study for cartographers carrying out research on problems in usability. This paper is based on previous usabil...

The first part of this publication deals with theoretical aspects of the evaluation of cartographic products. Existing evaluation approaches of cartographic products are described, from strictly subjective evaluation methods to objective methods focusing on usability of cartographic visualizations. The obvious emphasis is put on psychological aspec...

This paper summarizes the results of an experiment performed as basic research of 3D display of geographical information using with two alternative control devices (a Wii Remote Controller and a mouse). The aim was to explore the influence of a specific type of visualization on the human understanding of depicted geographical information and to dis...

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have technical capabilities to extended usage in various fields of science. The existing UAVs are to be relatively easily accessible in the near future. It is possible to equip them with different sensors but there are still some usage limitations. This paper focuses on demonstrating UAVs usage for research in polar r...

In this workshop we are going to present Hypothesis, web application used for creating test batteries, which can be administered via internet connection. It was developed using modern techniques of dynamic web and its architecture has three layers: client, server and database. One of the biggest advantages is possibility of adaptive testing, where...

The paper concerns a possible method for evaluating cartographic visualizations, with the emphasis on the perspective of the individual differences. Empirical usability testing of a newly proposed cartographic visualization is always an important step in the map-making process. This paper proposes an experimental design for testing the usability of...

Since the second half of the 17th century, tax relief has been available to farmers and landowners to offset flood damage to property (buildings) and land (fields, meadows, pastures, gardens) in South Moravia, Czech Republic. Historically, the written applications for this were supported by a relatively efficient bureaucratic process that left a cl...