Popup-Plots: Warping Temporal Data Visualization

Abstract

Temporal data visualization is used to analyze dependent variables that vary over time, with time being an independent variable. Visualizing temporal data is inherently difficult, due to the many aspects that need to be communicated to the users (e.g., time and variable changes). This is an important topic in visualization, and a wide range of visualization techniques dealing with different tasks have already been designed. In this paper we propose popup-plots, a novel concept where the common interaction of 3D rotation is used to navigate through the data. This allows the users to view the data from different perspectives without having to learn and adapt to new interaction concepts. Popup-plots are therefore a novel method for visualizing and interacting with dependent variables over time. We extend 2D plots with the temporal information by bending the space according to the time. The bending is calculated based on a spherical coordinates approach, which is continuously influenced by the viewing direction towards the plot. Hence, the plot can be viewed from various angles with seamless transitions in between, offering the possibility to analyze different aspects of the represented data. As the current viewing direction is inherently depicted by the shape of the data, the users are able to deduce which part of the data is currently viewed. The temporal information is encoded into the visualization itself, resembling annual rings of a tree. We demonstrate our method by applying it to data from two different domains, comprising measurements at spatial positions over time, and we also evaluated the usability of our solution.