Flip Zooming: A Practical Focus+Context Approach to Visualizing Large Data Sets

When working with a large material, such as a document or a database, it is often desirable to be able to examine some part of the material in detail, while still retaining a contextual overview. This becomes problematic when the material has to be displayed on a computer screen. Many visualization techniques that attempt to overcome problems associated with displaying large amounts of data have been developed. The so-called focus+context visualization techniques attempt to give users an overview over the whole information (the context) while simultaneously making it possible to view or work with some part of the material in detail (the focus). Focus+context techniques include the bifocal display [7], the generalized fish-eye view [1], the graphical fish-eye view [6], the perspective wall [4] and the document lens [5]. An overview of distortion-based presentation techniques is given in [3].