A Visual Lens Toolkit for Mobile Devices

Current smart mobile devices such as Pocket PCs have become common accepted daily-life personal assistants. Such mobile devices provide much less support for visualization compared to desktop computers. When developing mobile visualization applications, one should take the limited screen size, currently available interaction tools and relatively poor computation power into consideration. We describe a visual lens toolkit integrated with Focus+Context technique and it can be incorporated into various applications on Pocket PCs. Our technique creates a distorted display view of target object in a high resolution focus area that is smoothly embedded into the distorted context. We have tested the toolkit in two applications as stylistic lens and sketch lens separately and received fine experiment results. In remote line drawing of 3D model system, the lens toolkit embedded into the client side mainly serve as stylistic lens which provide the users with different presentation styles of the model according to the current viewpoint and focus. In mobile sketch system, the lens toolkit performs like a refinement filter which adoptively turns the loose sketch or SVG file into finer image. Both tested applications.