A perceptual assessment of the chromatic scale of uncertainty in hypothetical virtual architectural 3D reconstruction

Chromatic multilevel scales and matrices are popular tools used by scholars to visually communicate uncertainty and other aspects in many scientific contexts, including that of hypothetical virtual 3D reconstruction of lost or never-built architecture. False-colour visualisations play a pivotal role in improving the transparency of the complex inference-based process that is inevitable when dealing with lacking data sets, nevertheless, there are still no standards of reference in this field. This paper investigates this topic and tries to formulate good practices for creating easily readable and effective multi-level chromatic scales that will be applied to shaded 3D models. Furthermore, a newly designed chromatic 7-level scale of colours that empirically proved to perform better than the previous scales will be proposed. The results of this study are supported by an on-field survey administered to 50 users.