Furnas, G. W., & Zhang, X. (1998). MuSE: A Multiscale Editor. In Proceedings of User Interface and Software Technology (UIST 98) ACM Press, pp. 107-116

By Chang Ha Lee

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the authoring tool for the new type of vast information world, Zoomable User Interfaces. The authors of this paper explain ZUIs briefly and introduce a prototype authoring system for ZUIs, called MuSE(Multiscale Editor).

They describe the design problems which a multiscale authoring tool must solve. They mention editing tasks like the creation, modification and coordination of zooming effects, and the creation and modification of pan/zoom trajectories.

For these tasks they designed the MuSE as a two-window editor. To deal with the two dimensions of space(x,y) and one dimension of scale(z), they created the Space Editor(SE) for the two dimensions of space(x,y) and the Space Scale Editor(SSE) for the one dimension of space(x) and one of scale(z). The SSE is based on Space Scale Diagram(SSD).

As they proceeded with development they found some problems and they describe the problems and their solutions.

This paper is very familiar because we read papers about Space Scale Diagram which is the key idea of MuSE and we watched the demo of MuSE.

The main idea of taking abstract scale and presenting it as a spatial dimension is very simple and straightforward but seems very effective. And they evaluated their work and suggest their solutions to the problems. There are many interesting ideas like dynamic grids for the snap-to-grid and x-shear.

1. They use one dimension of space(x) and one of scale(z) to represent two dimension of space(x,y) and one of scale(z) in the SSE. Because of this omission of information, there might be some confusions. For example, If there are several objects which have the same x coordinate and different y coordinate, They will be overlapped in the SSE. My suggestion is to make the SE rotatable. According to the direction of the SE, the view of the SSE is also changed.