Understand space-time accessibility using a visual metaphor: a case study in Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Belt

Space-time accessibility among spatial elements has been widely studied, but fewer interactive visualization products have been delivered. The concept of space-time accessibility is hard to be displayed, and most methods lack capabilities of handling relevant space-time attribute information in a cartographic form. To tackle this issue, our research presents a visual metaphor method to demonstrate space-time accessibility in a terrain-like form. We first employ a water flow model to analyze the space-time accessibility and further build a terrain-like visual metaphor for effectively displaying the analytical results in a three-dimensional frame. Compared to previous studies, the visual metaphor is used to map the high dimensional space to a lower dimension virtual terrain space with the spatial cognition to comprehensively understand the space-time accessibility of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Belt.