Starfield Information Visualization with Interactive Smooth Zooming

This paper discusses the design and implementation of interactive smooth zooming of a starfield display (which is a visualization of a multi-attribute database) and introduces the zoom bar, a new widget for zooming and panning. Whereas traditional zoom techniques are based on zooming towards or away from a focal point, this paper introduces a novel approach based on zooming towards or away from a fixed line. Starfield displays plot items from a database as small selectable glyphs using two of the ordinal attributes of the data as the variables along the display axes. One way of filtering this visual information is by changing the range of displayed values on either of the display axes. If this is done incrementally and smoothly, the starfield display appears to zoom in and out, and users can track the motion of the glyphs without getting disoriented by sudden, large changes in context.