Peek Brush: A High-Speed Lightweight Ad-Hoc Selection for Multiple Coordinated Views

Linking+Brushing is a proven concept to reveal relationships across multiple views. Defining complex selections, however, may involve a significant interaction overhead. This paper proposes Peek Brush, a point-brush that is designed to temporarily select and highlight items hovered by the user´s mouse cursor. This enables quickly skimming through the data to identify relationships between different data projections within seconds. The Peek Brush serves the purpose of defining a starting point to a more focused inspection using brushes with higher complexity. In order to achieve rapid visual updates, we discuss acceleration techniques like preprocessing, threading, and layering. As a result, the Peek Brush is able to scale to datasets with millions of entries. A case study demonstrates how the Peek Brush minimizes the interaction effort required from the user. It delivers a quick overview and reduces the time needed for the initial visual analysis step from minutes to seconds.