Discovering the Covered: Ghost-Views in Information Visualization

A not negligible number of information visualization techniques uses 3D-geometry to visualize data and structures. Thereby, constantly growing data volumes influence the final visual representation and often result in the occlusion of certain items. Therefore, different approaches have been developed that mainly manipulate item positions to uncover specific items of interest or otherwise use filtering and information hiding to reduce the amount of visible items. This paper presents a novel method to adapt 3D-views from information visualization by the use of the well-known illustrative technique ghost-view to successfully address this occlusion problem. Applying ghost-views to 3D information visualization techniques ensures the visibility of selected items by view-dependently manipulating the transparency of unselected data: without any manipulation of positions or continuous context suppression. Our approach is applicable to most 3D visualization techniques. It is interactive and easy to adapt to existing visualization environments.