Navani: Navigating Large-Scale Visualisations with Animated Transitions

When visualising datasets that are too large to be displayed in their entirity, interactive navigation is a common solution. However, instantaneous updates of the visualisation when navigating can result in disruption to the user's mental map. Animated transitions are one way of addressing this problem. This paper presents the data-model-view-controller (DMVC) architecture for navigation-based interactive systems. Navani, a software framework based on DMVC for supporting animated transitions during navigation, is presented, along with a sample application of it to hierarchical data.