A Vector Field Design Approach to Animated Transitions
Yong Wang, Daniel Archambault, Carlos E. Scheidegger, Huamin Qu
Trajectories of animated transitions between two views of some randomly-generated datasets. The paths of different groups of points are indicated with different colors.
Description
Animated transitions can be effective in explaining and exploring a small number of visualizations where there are drastic changes in the scene over a short interval of time. This is especially true if data elements cannot be visually distinguished by other means. Current research in animated transitions has mainly focused on linear transitions (all elements follow straight line paths) or enhancing coordinated motion through bundling of linear trajectories. In this paper, we introduce animated transition design, a technique to build smooth, non-linear transitions for clustered data with either minimal or no user involvement. The technique is flexible and simple to implement, and has the additional advantage that it explicitly enhances coordinated motion and can avoid crowding, which are both important factors to support object tracking in a scene. We investigate its usability, provide preliminary evidence for the effectiveness of this technique through metric evaluations and user study and discuss limitations and future directions.
Materials
Publication
Wang, Yong, Daniel Archambault, Carlos E. Scheidegger, and Huamin Qu. "A Vector Field Design Approach to Animated Transitions." IEEE transactions on visualization and computer graphics 24, no. 9 (2018): 2487-2500.