Visual metaphor is a significant method in visualization, which is designed to present complex data through familiar concepts to enhance users’ understanding and analytical capabilities. With the development of visual analytics techniques, researchers have widely applied visual metaphor methods in various fields, such as social media, biomedicine, and human-computer interaction. This paper reviews the studies that utilize visual metaphors in the visualization field and summarizes the types of data and the forms of visual metaphors. Then, it classifies and summarizes existing work from the perspective of visual metaphor construction methods and provides an overview of different application scenarios and their advantages of visual metaphors. Finally, it outlines future research directions for visual metaphor methods in visualization.
Aodeng et al. (Sat,) studied this question.