Teaching:TUW - UE InfoVis WS 2008/09 - Gruppe 03 - Aufgabe 1 - Cone Tree
Introduction
Cone Trees are a suitable visualization technique for dealing with a great amount of information in hierachichal struture, with the aim to display and navigate through the information in an intuitative manner. On screens a 2D layout of such structures wouldn't be easy to handle with. It would not fit on the screen and "The user would have to either scroll through the layout or use a size-reduced image of the structure."
The root node is placed at the apex of the cone tree. All children nodes are placed at equal distances along the base. This process is repeated for every following level.
For navigation the user can rotate the cone and choose a special node, which is shown with an animation.
Critics
A study showed that subjects were significantly slower at locating named files in a hierarchical data structure when using a cone tree interface than when using a 'normal' tree interface. [Cockburn and Mckenzie, 2000]
References
- [Robertson et al., 1991] George Robertson, Jock D. Mackinlay, Stuart Card. Cone Trees: Animated 3D Visualizations of Hierarchical Information. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference, pages 189-- 194, April 28 - June 5, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana, June 1991. Association for Computing Machinery
- [Cockburn and Mckenzie, 2000] Andy Cockburn, Bruce Mckenzie. An Evaluation of Cone Trees. In People and Computers XIV: British Computer Society Conference on Human Computer Interaction 2000, p425--436. Springer-Verlag.