Contrôle et présentation interactifs des transitions fluides dans les visualisations

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to propose new types of smoothly animated transitions for data visualization that facilitate visual tracking of items and overall perception by a user. The work also proposes new types of widgets for interactively controlling transitions that are more complete and flexible than previous techniques. To analyze different types of animated transitions, a prototype has been developed to visualize tree structures. Two types of previously published transitions, linear and staged animations, have been implemented in the prototype, allowing for three types of changes on the nodes (collapsing, expanding and permuting) that can occur at different levels of the tree. Additionally, two novel transition techniques, hierarchical animations and hybrid animations, were designed and implemented in the prototype. These new transition techniques are designed to leverage the hierarchical structure of the data, and better direct the user’s attention according to the levels of the tree. To evaluate these four animation techniques, a controlled experiment was conducted where participants were asked to track a specific node and also identify other nodes that had been collapsed, expanded or permutated over the course of a transition. The results show a significant advantage for hierarchical and hybrid animations over linear and staged animations for observing permutations. The results also found no advantage of staged animations over simple linear animations. Next, an analysis of existing techniques for interactive control of animations highlighted three key functionalities that popup widgets for animation control should have: enabling discrete control, enabling continuous control, and displaying the current position in the transition. To combine these functionalities, several novel widget designs are presented and organized within a taxonomy classifying them according to the type of interaction used to switch between discrete control and continuous control, and also according to the direction of movement used for continuous control.

Date	30 Aug 2011
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Michael John McGuffin (Supervisor)