Interactive visualization
Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message. Visualization has been an effective way to communicate both abstract and concrete ideas since man first started communicating - from cave paintings to modern day video games.
For a visualization to be considered interactive it must satisfy two criteria:
- User input: control of some aspect of the visual representation of information, or of the information being represented, must be available to the user.
- Response time: changes made by the user must be reflected in the visualization in a reasonable time.
We focus on interaction as a vehicle for delivering effective communication. By combining layers of information with user interaction we can improve human understanding in six basic ways:
- by increasing cognitive resources, such as by using a visual resource to expand human working memory
- by reducing search, such as by representing a large amount of data in a small space
- by enhancing the recognition of patterns, such as when information is organized in space by its time relationships
- by supporting the easy perceptual inference of relationships that are otherwise more difficult to induce
- by perceptual monitoring of a large number of potential events
- by providing a manipulable medium that, unlike static diagrams, enables the exploration of a space of parameter values