Powers of ten thousand: navigating in large information spaces

ABSTRACT

How would you interactively browse a very large display space, for example, a street map of the entire United States? The traditional solution is zoom and pan. But each time a zoom-in operation takes place, the context from which it came is visually lost. Sequential applications of the zoom-in and zoom-out operations may become tedious. This paper proposes an alternative technique, the macroscope, based on zooming and planning in multiple translucent layers. A macroscope display should comfortably permit browsing continuously on a single image, or set of images in multiple resolutions, on a scale of at least 1 to 10,000.

REFERENCES

• 1: Eric A. Bier , Maureen C. Stone , Ken Pier , William Buxton , Tony D. DeRose, Toolglass and magic lenses: the see-through interface, Proceedings of the 20th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques, p.73-80, September 1993 [doi>10.1145/166117.166126]
• 2: Colby, G., and L. Scholl, Transparency and Blur as Selective Cues for Complex Visual Information, SPiE, March 1991.
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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Interaction styles (e.g., commands, menus, forms, direct manipulation)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems
          Subjects: Hypertext navigation and maps**
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: Evaluation/methodology

General Terms:
Design, Theory