Interactive Information Visualization of a Million Items

Abstract

Information visualization is a research domain that aims at supporting the discovery and analysis of data through visual exploration. Popular mappings exist for a large range of data structures—such as tables, trees, graphs as well as more specialized ones. Most visualization techniques have a strong interaction component allowing users to explore the data. Existing information visualization techniques are usually limited to the display of a few thousand items. This chapter describes new interactive information visualization techniques capable of handling a million items (effectively visible and manageable on screen). These techniques rely on (1) hardware acceleration to achieve the speed required for interaction and animation, (2) nonstandard visual attributes, such as stereovision or synthetic overlap count, to enhance visualization, and (3) animation and interaction while replaying recorded visualization configurations (views) using time multiplexing techniques to analyze the data across several views and mappings without losing context. The chapter evaluates the use of hardware-based techniques available with newer graphics cards, as well as new animation techniques and nonstandard graphical features, such as stereovision and overlap count. These techniques have been applied to two popular information visualizations—treemaps and scatter plot diagrams—but are generic enough to be applied to other 2D representations as well.