It is becoming increasingly common for user interfaces to use zooming visual effects that automatically adapt to user actions. The MacOs X ‘dock’ icon panel, for instance, uses a fisheye distortion to assist users in targeting items. Another example is ‘speed-dependent automatic zooming’, which has been shown to improve scrolling by automatically varying zoom level with scroll speed—when scroll...

ion. While graphical zooming changes the scale of the object being viewed, semantic zooming changes the level of information abstraction, for example, zooming out would mean going to a higher level of abstraction. It is often employed in conjunction with progressive disclosure, which provides task-specific presentation and interaction in a sequence of displays. Much of this capability was achie...

Previously we have presented CAT (Clustered Album Thumbnail), a technique for browsing large image collections, and its interface for controlling the level of details (LOD). CAT applies treestructured clustering to images based on their keywords and pixel values, and selects representative images for each cluster. A hierarchical data visualization technique displays the tree structured organiza...

Previous studies indicate that user performance with scrolling can be improved through Speed-Dependent Automatic Zooming (SDAZ), which automatically couples the document’s zoom-level with scroll-speed. These studies have compared traditional scrolling techniques (scrollbars and rate-based scrolling) with SDAZ, leaving a potential confound that the efficiency gains are due to zooming rather than...

Speed-dependent automatic zooming couples the user’s rate of motion through an information space with the zoom level—the faster the user moves the ‘higher’ they fly above the work surface. Igarashi and Hinckley [2000] proposed using the technique to improve scrolling through large documents. Their informal preliminary evaluation showed mixed results with participants completing scrolling tasks ...