To direct attention and communicate context, visualization designers often employ augmentations such as annotations, animated transitions, and stylistic layouts. While graphical perception principles can helpfully prescribe effective low-level representations of data, they lack guidance for augmentations that service higher-level communication goals. To bridge this gap, we contribute a design space that frames designer intent as viewer-oriented cognitive behaviors, grounding communicative aims in actionable visualization design techniques, including both visual encodings and augmentations. This design space consists of common augmentation tactics (annotation, animation, stylized encodings, etc.) that implement design strategies (spotlighting, sequencing, association, etc.) to achieve higher-level design goals (observe, interpret, introspect), often simultaneously. We demonstrate the analytic and generative value of our design space with examples across varied designer objectives. We discuss how our contributions help align designer intent with reader takeaways, pave the way for readers to learn more effectively, and enable future (semi-)automated systems to support visualization designers in achieving their communication goals.

Visualization linters are end-user facing evaluators that automatically identify potential chart issues. These spell-checker like systems offer a blend of interpretability and customization that is not found in other forms of automated assistance. However, existing linters do not model context and have primarily targeted users who do not need assistance, resulting in obvious-even annoying-advice. We investigate these issues within the domain of color palette design, which serves as a microcosm of visualization design concerns. We contribute a GUI-based color palette linter as a design probe that covers perception, accessibility, context, and other design criteria, and use it to explore visual explanations, integrated fixes, and user defined linting rules. Through a formative interview study and theory-driven analysis, we find that linters can be meaningfully integrated into graphical contexts thereby addressing many of their core issues. We discuss implications for integrating linters into visualization tools, developing improved assertion languages, and supporting end-user tunable advice-all laying the groundwork for more effective visualization linters in any context.

Communicating the right affect, a feeling, experience or emotion, is critical in creating engaging visual communication. We carried out three studies examining how different color properties (lightness, chroma and hue) and different palette properties (combinations and distribution of colors) contribute to different affective interpretations in information visualization where the numbers of colors is typically smaller than the rich palettes used in design. Our results show how color and palette properties can be manipulated to achieve affective expressiveness even in the small sets of colors used for data encoding in information visualization.

When data categories have strong color associations, it is useful to use these semantically meaningful concept-color associations in data visualizations. In this paper, we explore how linguistic information about the terms defining the data can be used to generate semantically meaningful colors. To do this effectively, we need first to establish that a term has a strong semantic color association, then discover which color or colors express it. Using co-occurrence measures of color name frequencies from Google n-grams, we define a measure for colorability that describes how strongly associated a given term is to any of a set of basic color terms. We then show how this colorability score can be used with additional semantic analysis to rank and retrieve a representative color from Google Images. Alternatively, we use symbolic relationships defined by WordNet to select identity colors for categories such as countries or brands. To create visually distinct color palettes, we use k-means clustering to create visually distinct sets, iteratively reassigning terms with multiple basic color associations as needed. This can be additionally constrained to use colors only in a predefined palette.

Abstract We introduce an algorithm for automatic selection of semantically‐resonant colors to represent data (e.g., using blue for data about “oceans”, or pink for “love”). Given a set of categorical values and a target color palette, our algorithm matches each data value with a unique color. Values are mapped to colors by collecting representative images, analyzing image color distributions to determine value‐color affinity scores, and choosing an optimal assignment. Our affinity score balances the probability of a color with how well it discriminates among data values. A controlled study shows that expert‐chosen semantically‐resonant colors improve speed on chart reading tasks compared to a standard palette, and that our algorithm selects colors that lead to similar gains. A second study verifies that our algorithm effectively selects colors across a variety of data categories.

Our ability to reliably name colors provides a link between visual perception and symbolic cognition. In this paper, we investigate how a statistical model of color naming can enable user interfaces to meaningfully mimic this link and support novel interactions. We present a method for constructing a probabilistic model of color naming from a large, unconstrained set of human color name judgments. We describe how the model can be used to map between colors and names and define metrics for color saliency (how reliably a color is named) and color name distance (the similarity between colors based on naming patterns). We then present a series of applications that demonstrate how color naming models can enhance graphical interfaces: a color dictionary & thesaurus, name-based pixel selection methods for image editing, and evaluation aids for color palette design.

Overlaid reference elements need to be sufficiently visible to effectively relate to the underlying information, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. We seek to create guidelines for presenting such structures through experimental studies to define boundary conditions for visual intrusiveness. We base our work on the practice of designers, who use transparency to integrate overlaid grids with their underlying imagery. Previous work discovered a useful range of alpha values for black or white grids overlayed on scatterplot images rendered in shades of gray over gray backgrounds of different lightness values. This work compares black grids to blue and red ones on different image types of scatterplots and maps. We expected that the coloured grids over grayscale images would be more visually salient than black ones, resulting in lower alpha values. Instead, we found that there was no significant difference between the boundaries set for red and black grids, but that the boundaries for blue grids were set consistently higher (more opaque). As in our previous study, alpha values are affected by image density rather than image type, and are consistently lower than many default settings. These results have implications for the design of subtle reference structures.

Visual elements such as grids, labels, and contour lines act as reference structures that support the primary information being presented. Such structures need to be usefully visible, but not so obtrusive that they clutter the presentation. Visual designers know how to carefully manage transparency and layering in an image to balance these elements. We want the presentation of these structures in complex, dynamic, computer-generated visualizations to reflect the same subtlety and comfort of good design. Our goal is to determine the physical, perceptual, and cognitive characteristics of such structures in a way that enables automatic presentation. Our approach to this problem does not try to characterize "ideal” or "best,” but instead seeks boundary conditions that define a range of visible yet subtle legibility. All presentations that are clearly bad lie outside of this range, and can easily be avoided. In this paper, we report three experiments investigating the effects of grid color and spacing on these boundary conditions, defined by manipulating the transparency (alpha) of thin rectangular grids over scatter plots. Our results show that while there is some variation due to user preference and image properties, bounding alpha allows us to reliably predict a range of usable yet unobtrusive grids over a wide variety of conditions.

The iStuff toolkit of physical devices, and the flexible software infrastructure to support it, were designed to simplify the exploration of novel interaction techniques in the post-desktop era of multiple users, devices, systems and applications collaborating in an interactive environment. The toolkit leverages an existing interactive workspace in-frastructure, making it lightweight and platform independent. The supporting software framework includes a dynamically configurable intermediary to simplify the mapping of devices to applications. We describe the iStuff architecture and provide several examples of iStuff, organized into a design space of ubiquitous computing interaction components. The main contribution is a physical toolkit for distributed, heterogeneous environments with run-time retargetable device data flow. We conclude with some insights and experiences derived from using this toolkit and framework to prototype experimental interaction techniques for ubiquitous computing environments.

We describe the design of and experience with PointRight, a peer-to-peer pointer and keyboard redirection system that operates in multi-machine, multi-user environments. PointRight employs a geometric model for redirecting input across screens driven by multiple independent machines and operating systems. It was created for interactive workspaces that include large, shared displays and individual laptops, but is a general tool that supports many different configurations and modes of use. Although previous systems have provided for re-routing pointer and keyboard control, in this paper we present a more general and flexible system, along with an analysis of the types of re-binding that must be handled by any pointer redirection system This paper describes the system, the ways in which it has been used, and the lessons that have been learned from its use over the last two years.

This paper describes new interaction techniques for direct pen-based interaction on the Interactive Mural, a large (6′x3.5′) high resolution (64 dpi) display. They have been tested in a digital brainstorming tool that has been used by groups of professional product designers. Our "interactive wall" metaphor for interaction has been guided by several goals: to support both free-hand sketching and high-resolution materials, such as images, 3D models and GUI application windows; to present a visual appearance that does not clutter the content with control devices; and to support fluid interaction, which minimizes the amount of attention demanded and interruption due to the mechanics of the interface. We have adapted and extended techniques that were developed for electronic whiteboards and generalized the use of the FlowMenu to execute a wide variety of actions in a single pen stroke, While these techniques were designed for a brainstorming tool, they are very general and can be used in a wide variety of application domains using interactive surfaces.

Traditional database query systems allow users to construct complicated database queries from specialized database language primitives.While powerful and expressive, such systems are not easy to use, especially for browsing or exploring the data.Information visualization systems address this problem by providing graphical presentations of the data and direct manipulation tools for exploring the data.Recent work has reported the value of dynamic queries coupled with twodimensional data representations for progressive refinement of user queries.However, the queries generated by these systems are limited to conjunctions of global ranges of parameter values.In this paper, we extend dynamic queries by encoding each operand of the query as a Magic Lens filter.Compound queries can be constructed by overlapping the lenses.Each lens includes a slider and a set of buttons to control the value of the filter function and to define the composition operation generated by overlapping the lenses.We demonstrate a system that supports multiple, simultaneous, general, real-valued queries on databases with incomplete data, while maintaining the simple visual interface of dynamic query systems.

Rendering systems can produce images that include the entire range of visible colors. Imaging hardware, however, can reproduce only a subset of these colors: the device gamut. An image can only be correctly displayed if all of its colors lie inside of the gamut of the target device. Current solutions to this problem are either to correct the scene colors by hand, or to apply gamut mapping techniques to the final image. We propose a methodology called device-directed rendering that performs scene color adjustments automatically. Device-directed rendering applies classic minimization techniques to a symbolic representation of the image that describes the relationship of the scene lights and surfaces to the pixel colors. This representation can then be evaluated to produce an image that is guaranteed to be in gamut. Although our primary application has been correcting out-of-gamut colors, this methodology can be generally applied to the problem of adjusting a scene description to accommodate constraints on the output image pixel values.

Article A taxonomy of see-through tools Share on Authors: Eric A. Bier Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Maureen C. Stone Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Ken Fishkin Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CA Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd., Palo Alto, CAView Profile , William Buxton University of Toronto, CSRI, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1A4 University of Toronto, CSRI, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5S 1A4View Profile , Thomas Baudel Université de Paris-Sud, LRI, 91 405 Orsay Cedex, France Université de Paris-Sud, LRI, 91 405 Orsay Cedex, FranceView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '94: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsApril 1994 Pages 358–364https://doi.org/10.1145/191666.191786Online:24 April 1994Publication History 83citation1,192DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations83Total Downloads1,192Last 12 Months17Last 6 weeks5 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

MagicLensT'l filters area new user interface tool that combine an arbitrarily-shaped region with an operator that changes the view of objects viewed through that region.These tools can be interactively positioned over on-screen applications much as a magnifying glass is moved over a newspaper.They can be used to help the user understand various types of information, from text documents to scientific visualizations.Because these filters are movable and apply to only part of the screen, they have a number of advantages over traditional windowwide viewing modes: they employ an attractive metaphor based on physical lenses, show a modified view in the context of the original view, limit clutter to a small region, allow easy construction of visual macros and provide a uniform paradigm that can be extended across different types of infomlation and applications.This paper describes these advantages in more detail and illustrates them with examples of magic lens filters in use over a variety of applications.

Toolglass™ widgets are new user interface tools that can appear, as though on a transparent sheet of glass, between an application and a traditional cursor.They can be positioned with one hand while the other positions the cursor.The widgets provide a rich and concise vocabulary for operating on application objects.These widgets may incorporate visual filters, called Magic Lens™ filters, that modify the presentation of application objects to reveal hidden information, to enhance data of interest, or to suppress distracting information.Together, these tools form a see-through interface that offers many advantages over traditional controls.They provide a new style of interaction that better exploits the user's everyday skills.They can reduce steps, cursor motion, and errors.Many widgets can be provided in a user interface, by designers and by users, without requiring dedicated screen space.In addition, lenses provide rich context-dependent feedback and the ability to view details and context simultaneously.Our widgets and lenses can be combined to form operation and viewing macros, and can be used over multiple applications.

In this paper, we analyze planar parametric cubic curves to determine conditions for loops, cusps, or inflection points. By expressing the curve to be analyzed as a linear combination of control points, it can be transformed such that three of the control points are mapped to specific locations on the plane. We call this image curve the canonical curve . Affine maps do not affect inflection points, cusps, or loops, so the analysis can be applied to the canonical curve instead of the original one. Since the first three points are fixed, the canonical curve is completely characterized by the position of its fourth point. The analysis therefore reduces to observing which region of the canonical plane the fourth point occupies. We demonstrate that for all parametric cubes expressed in this form, the boundaries of these regions are tonics and straight lines. Special cases include Bézier curves, B-splines, and Beta-splines. Such a characterization forms the basis for an easy and efficient solution to this problem.

Principles and techniques useful for calibrated color reproduction are defined. These results are derived from a project to take digital images designed on a variety of different color monitors and accurately reproduce them in a journal using digital offset printing. Most of the images printed were reproduced without access to the image as viewed in its original form; the color specification was derived entirely from calorimetric specification. The techniques described here are not specific to offset printing and can be applied equally well to other digital color devices. The reproduction system described is calibrated using CIE tristimulus values. An image is represented as a set of three-dimensional points, and the color output device as a three-dimensional solid surrounding the set of all reproducible colors for that device, called its gamut . The shapes of the monitor and the printer gamuts are very different, so it is necessary to transform the image points to fit into the destination gamut, a process we call gamut mapping . This paper describes the principles that control gamut mapping. Included also are some details on monitor and printer calibration, and a brief description of how digital halftone screens for offset printing are prepared.

We are interested in the problem of making precise line drawings using interactive computer graphics. In precise line drawings, specific relationships are expected to hold between points and lines. In published interactive drawing systems, precise relationships have been achieved by using rectangular grids or by solving simultaneous equations (constraints). The availability of fast display hardware and plentiful computational power suggest that we should take another look at the ruler and compass techniques traditionally used by draftsmen. Snap-dragging uses the ruler and compass metaphor to help the user place his next point with precision, and uses heuristics to automatically place guiding lines and circles that are likely to help the user construct each shape. Snap-dragging also provides translation, rotation, and scaling operations that take advantage of the precision placement capability. We show that snap-dragging compares favorably in power and ease of use with grid or constraint techniques.

If there is to be widespread acceptance of computer generated images in areas traditionally served by graphic artists, these images must meet a high standard of quality. Document preparation systems are an application area that is gaining maturity in providing high-quality computer typeset documents. These systems exhibit a trend towards specifying the formatting information for a document separately from the body of the text. The goal is to have the document format designed by someone with expert knowledge of typography. Writers can then apply a format to their own work simply by indicating the semantic content of their text, such as the headings, paragraphs, or footnotes. The result is that a writer can produce properly typeset documents without learning the esthetics of typography. This paper extends this idea to encompass the illustrations in the text. We have developed a prototype system that uses a set of graphical style rules to define the design guidelines for the illustrations. The rules, called a graphical style sheet, can be used to control a uniform “look” over a set of illustrations, or to change the appearance of a particular illustration to reflect different publishing styles or different media. The prototype coordinates with an existing document preparation system and the combined systems were used to produce this paper. We conclude that this is a viable method for controlling image style for at least one class of illustrations. This approach contributes to image quality by providing a method for capturing knowledge of graphic arts standards, and for ensuring a consistent appearance of related illustrations within technical documentation.

Parametric piecewise-cubic functions are used throughout the computer graphics industry to represent curved shapes. For many applications, it would be useful to be able to reliably derive this representation from a closely spaced set of points that approximate the desired curve, such as the input from a digitizing tablet or a scanner. This paper presents a solution to the problem of automatically generating efficient piecewise parametric cubic polynomial approximations to shapes from sampled data. We have developed an algorithm that takes a set of sample points, plus optional endpoint and tangent vector specifications, and iteratively derives a single parametric cubic polynomial that lies close to the data points as defined by an error metric based on least-squares. Combining this algorithm with dynamic programming techniques to determine the knot placement gives good results over a range of shapes and applications.

The visual quality of raster images makes them attractive for applications such as business graphics and document illustration. Such applications are most fully served using interactive systems to describe curves, areas and text which can be rendered at high resolution for the final copy. However, to present such imagery in an interactive environment for moderate cost is difficult. Techniques are presented that provide solutions to the problems of scan conversion, screen update, and hit testing for a class of interactive systems called illustrators. The design rests on the use of software display file encoding techniques. These ideas have been used in the implementation of several illustration programs on a personal minicomputer.