Extended Excentric Labeling

Abstract

The paper presents an extension to the Excentric Labeling, a labeling technique to dynamically show labels around a movable lens. Each labels refers to one object within the lens and is connected to it through a line. The original implementation has several known limitations and potential improvements that we address in this work, like: high density areas, uneven density distributions, and summary statistics. We describe the implemented extensions and present a think-aloud user study. The study shows that users can naturally understand and easily operate the majority of the implemented function but label scrolling, which requires additional research. From the study we also gained unanticipated requirements and interesting directions for further research.

Exploring entities in text with descriptive non-photorealistic rendering

“…We thought for most participants the lens widget would be used only after the 3D model is moved into a desired orientation, however this is not supported by the logs. The participant strategies seem to group into three types: use of both the 3D scene and the lens widget for exploration (P3,6,8,9,10), only the lens (P2,7), and only the 3D scene (P1, 4,5,11). Surprisingly, participants did not make use of the document widget during this task.…”

“…In addition, summaries and other abstract information can be displayed as part of the labelling scheme [4]. Our system uses a similar approach, but additional small visualizations are shown instead of textual labels.…”

Contextual network navigation to provide situational awareness for network administrators

“…Techniques have been developed, such as the Extended Excentric Labeling scheme [7], which create summaries to reduce the number of labels required. This approach is certainly valid in this case, however suffers from the same domain knowledge requirement as collapsing the tree.…”

Boundary Labeling Methods for Dynamic Focus Regions

“…Fekete and Plaisant [8] propose a dynamic approach to place labels in stacks besides a circular focus region, with respect to the visible region. Subsequently their methods have been extended to tackle density issues within the 'lens' [5,15].…”