CorFish: Coordinating Emphasis across Multiple Views using Spatial Distortion

In the context of multiple views, coordination is essential to navigate and grasp the relationships lying behind the different juxtaposed views. Linked highlighting is a typical example of coordination where a subset of the data points is emphasized simultaneously on all views. The strength of this approach is that the selected data can be studied within its context. Other approaches have been used to implement coordination such as using varying levels of transparency or visual links. We propose to use spatial distortion to contribute a similar effect in multiple views. It is particularly suited to the context of multiple views since it alleviates the lack of screen space by reallocating it based on a certain definition of user interest. The proposed method targets coordination between views that represent the same entities and readily adapts to various visualization forms. It is based on a user degree-of-interest function, defined on these entities, that acts as a common ground for the distortion of all views. Views are distorted such that empty areas and areas holding entities of lesser interest are compressed to the benefit of areas holding entities of higher interest. To demonstrate its feasibility and versatility, we describe how to technically apply our approach to several common visualization techniques.