Tech Report HCIL-2002-01

Fekete, J., Plaisant, C. (January 2002)
Interactive Information Visualization of a Million Items
INFOVIS 2002. IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization, 2002, Page(s): 117 -124, Boston, October 2002. [Published Version]
HCIL-2002-01, CS-TR-4320, UMIACS-TR-2002-2

Existing information visualization techniques are usually limited to the display of a few thousand items. This article describes new interactive techniques capable of handling a million items (effectively visible and manageable on screen). We evaluate the use of hardware-based techniques available with newer graphics cards, as well as new animation techniques and non-standard 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 representations as well. Keywords I.3.6 Methodology and Techniques; H.5.2 User Interfaces; I.3.3 Picture/Image Generation.