Information visualization using 3D interactive animation

UI innovations are often driven by a combination of technology advances and application demands. On the technology side, advances in interactive computer graphics hardware, coupled with low-cost mass storage, have created new possibilities for information retrieval systems in which UIs could play a more central role. On the application side, increasing masses of information confronting a business or an individual have created a demand for information management applications. In the 1980s, text-editing forced the shaping of the desktop metaphor and the now standard GUI paradigm. In the 1990s, it is likely that information access will be a primary force in shaping the successor to the desktop metapho. This article presents an experimental system, the Information Visualizer (see figure 1), which explores a UI paradigm that goes beyond the desktop metaphor to exploit the emerging generation of graphical personal computers and to support the emerging application demand to retrieve, store, manipulate, and understand large amounts of infromation. The basic problem is how to utilize advancing graphics technology to lower the cost of finding information and accessing it once found (the information's “cost structurei). We take four broad strategies: making the user's immediate workspace larger, enabling user interaction with multiple agents, increasing the real-time interaction rate between user and system, and using visual abstraction to shift information to the perceptual system to speed information assimilation and retrieval

Document Icons and Page Thumbnails: Issues in Construction of Document Thumbnails for Page-Image Digital Libraries

Abstract. Digital libraries are increasingly based on digital page im-ages, but techniques for constructing usable versions of these page images are largely folklore. This paper documents some issues encountered in creating various kinds of renderings of page images for the UpLib digital library system, and suggests approaches for each, based on both prob-lem analysis and user feedback. Several factors important in determining useful sizes for small visual representations of the documents, called doc-ument icons, are discussed; one algorithm, called log-area, seems most effective.