Visual discomfort factor analysis and modeling for worldwide stereoscopic 3D maps

•This study is a first attempt at exploring human interaction with worldwide orthographic stereoscopic 3D (S3D) maps.•This study quantified the perceived terrain textures and identified its role of conveying visual discomfort when viewing S3D maps.•A great deal of literature studied the association between disparity and visual discomfort. This study found that after disparities were adjusted within the comfort zone of one degree, terrain texture, luminance, and amplitude spectrum associated 50% of visual discomfort.•This study contributes to a new S3D map database with subjective ratings of comfort levels from 24 participants including professional geologists and non-professionals. Their visual and physical symptoms were also self-reported with the General Eye Symptoms Questionnaires and the Simplified Simulator Sickness Questionnaires.•A prediction model was built based on subjective ratings and variables selected by factor analysis. The performance evaluation Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) was significantly lower than that reported in previous studies on different S3D databases.