Treecube: visualization tool for browsing 3D multimedia data

We propose a new 3D visualization tool for hierarchical information. A 2D visualization tool for hierarchical information called treemap has already been proposed by Ben Shneiderman, et al. in 1992. In general, hierarchical information is represented as a tree structure. Treemap hierarchically lays out each node as a bounding box whose size is the same as the specific weight or attribute value of the node. After the original treemap algorithm called slice-and-dice, some extensions to it have been proposed: squarified treemap (M. Buls et al., 2000), ordered treemap (B. Shneiderman et al., 2001) and strip treemap (B.B. Bederson et al., 2002). Furthermore, quantum treemap (B.B. Bederson et al., 2002) is a quantization version of these extensions. We propose a new 3D visualization tool for hierarchical information called treecube that can be taken as a 3D extension of treemap. Especially, we show its usefulness for browsing 3D multimedia data, i.e., 2D images, 3D shape models, motion data, etc., originally stored in a file system.