3D Distortion Viewing

Sheelagh Carpendale
David J. Cowperthwaite
F. David Fracchia

Overview

As the use of 3D information presentation becomes more prevalent the need for effective viewing tools grows accordingly. Much work has been done in developing tools for 2D spaces which allow for detail in context views. We examine the extension of such 2D methods to 3D and explore the limitations encountered in accessing internal regions of the data with these methods. We then describe a novel solution to this problem of internal access with the introduction of a distortion function which creates a clear line of sight to the focus revealing sections previously obscured. The distortion is symmetric about the line of sight and is smoothly integrated back into the original 3D layout.

Publications

M.S.T. Carpendale, D. J. Cowperthwaite and F. D. Fracchia. Extending Distortion Viewing Techniques from 2D to 3D Data. In Readings in Information Visualization: Using Vision to Think, pages 368-379. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, 1998.
M.S.T. Carpendale, D. J. Cowperthwaite and F. D. Fracchia. Extending Distortion Viewing Techniques from 2D to 3D Data. IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, Special Issue on Information Visualization, 17(4):42-51. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1997.
M. S. T. Carpendale, David J. Cowperthwaite and F. D. Fracchia. Distortion Viewing Techniques for 3D Data. In IEEE Visualization. IEEE Computer Society and ACM, pages 46-53, 1996.