3D Hexglyph Maps: An Immersive Analytics Technique Combining Hexbin Maps with Space-Time Cubes for Visualizing eSports Data

Displaying multivariate tempo-spatial data such as from competitive strategy games can support people in the challenging task of analyzing them. Within the Immersive Analytics discipline, technologies such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality are utilized for rendering such complex data and extending the tool set of analysts. In this paper, we introduce 3D Hexglyph Maps – a visualization technique drawing from both the Space-Time Cube and the Hexbin Map techniques for use in VR. We illustrate how we applied our glyph-based technique for analyzing trajectorial match data of the prominent Electronic Sports game League of Legends and discuss identified potential and limitations. The results of our user study show that our technique performed well concerning the completion rates, that our participants needed a short period before efficiently understanding the visualization by means of the completion times, and that an increase of the players whose data are visualized leads to a slight deceleration of the analysis process.