Title :
The effect of shading in extracting structure from space-filling visualizations
Author :
Irani, Pourang ; Slonowsky, Dean ; Shajahan, Peer
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Manitoba Univ., Canada
Abstract :
Shading information is extracted by the human visual system during the earliest stages of the object recognition process. While shading can enhance the visibility of structures, it can have a negative impact on the judgment of sizes of elements in a structure. In certain visualization systems the underlying hierarchical structure is not noticeably explicit, such as in space-filling techniques. We hypothesize that in such cases, shading can make the structure more explicit. In This work we report the results of a study comparing two space-filling visualizations: one with and the other without shading. Our results show that on structure-based tasks, users performed better with the tool when shading information was included than without. However we did not obtain statistically significant results to suggest that shading information degraded users´ performance on tasks requiring comparison of local features such as file sizes. A subjective evaluation shows that users preferred interacting with the system when shading was available.
Keywords :
data visualisation; object recognition; tree data structures; visual perception; 2-1/2D representation; CushionMap; TreeMap; human visual system; object recognition; shading information; space-filling visualizations; structure extraction; visual perception; Computer science; Data mining; Data structures; Data visualization; Degradation; Displays; Humans; Object recognition; Statistics; Visual system;
Conference_Titel :
Information Visualisation, 2004. IV 2004. Proceedings. Eighth International Conference on
Print_ISBN :
0-7695-2177-0
DOI :
10.1109/IV.2004.1320146