Extending distortion viewing from 2D to 3D

Addresses the visual exploration of 3D information layouts. Several visual exploration techniques have been proposed for 2D information layouts. Many of these try to take advantage of humans' natural visual pattern-recognition abilities to understand global relationships while simultaneously integrating this knowledge with local details. This desire for detail-in-context views (also called fisheye, multiscale and distortion views) has fueled considerable research in the development of distortion viewing tools. Generally, these tools provide space for magnification of local detail by compressing the rest of the image. In considering a possible detail-in-context view for 3D layouts, we first examine 2D distortion techniques, bearing in mind the particular 3D problem of occlusion. Comparing 2D and 3D information layout adjustment tools leads directly to a 3D visual access tool that clears a line of sight to any region of interest. While our technique can extend to any type of 3D information display, we focus on graphs.