Abstract:
This paper describes a new 2D focus+context
visualization technique for viewing and navigating
large hierarchical information. This technique uses a
semi-transparency approach to display both the global
and the detail views of the hierarchy with an
overlapped manner in the same display space. The
twin views always keep one in highlighted and another
in deemphasized, and this state can be shifted
interactively when a user focuses on other view. The
main advantage of this technique is that there is no
geometrical partitioning required and both the context
view and the focus view can use the full display space.
To achieve the smooth transactions between the views,
animation is accommodated to preserver user’s mental
map during the navigation. Although this visualization
technique can theoretically be applied to many layout
algorithms, we only apply this technique, in our
implementation, for viewing and navigating
hierarchies that are drawn by ENCCON [1] layout
algorithm.
