brianj@witsend.cs.umd.edu (Brian Johnson) (03/16/91)
I'm currently a doctoral student working under Ben Shneiderman at the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab. Among other things, we're currently interesting in the comprehension and navigation of large data space - particularily hierarchical information spaces. I've been calling this Tree Vizualization. I'm working on building visualizations of the structure and content of large trees. Some of you may have seen the Norton Utilities (on the Mac) disk browser. I came across it after I got involved in this work and it's sort of a poor mans version of what I'm doing, as it portrays none of the logical structure of the hierarchical file system and only codes a very limited amount of information. Things are going swimmingly, and visualizations of file directories with over 1000 leaf nodes (files) are quite nice. The basic idea is to eliminate the traditional space wasting tree displays in favor of a space-filling representation. Papers will be comming out soon, I'll have a tech report in april - let me know if you're interested. Anyone else doing similar work? Others in the lab are working on animated tables of contents, visual boolean queries, predictive user models, various input devices (touchscreen, pen, etc..no VR:-(, etc... Let's see some more lab reports. -- Brian Johnson Computer Science Department brianj@cs.umd.edu University of Maryland (301) 405-2725 College Park, Md 20742