Tech Report CS-91-61

Graphical Fisheye Views of Graphs

Manojit Sarkar and Marc H. Brown

October 1991

Abstract:

A {\em fisheye lens} is a very wide-angle lens that shows places nearby in detail while also showing remote regions in progressively less detail. This paper describes a system for viewing and browsing planar graphs using a software analog of a fisheye lens. We first show how to implement such a view using solely geometric transformations. We then describe a more general transformation that allows hierarchical, structural information about the graph to modify the views. Our general transformation is a fundamental extension to the early efforts in fisheye views.

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