Focus+context taken literally

A common feature of information visualization applications, and also other areas, is to direct the user's attention to certain objects. This alerts users to a problem or shows the matching objects in response to a query. Often users also want to quickly understand the information pointed out in the context of the other information and not just see the results. This is one type of the focus+context (F+C) technique, which provides both detailed information of the currently most relevant objects, as well as giving users an idea of the context. The authors present a focus+context method that blurs objects based on their relevance (rather than distance) to direct the user's attention.