Treecube: 3D visualization tool for hierarchical information

This paper proposes a new 3D visualization tool for hierarchical information. A 2D visualization tool for hierarchical information called treemap [1] has already been proposed by Ben Shneiderman, et al. in 1992. In general, hierarchical information is represented as a tree structure. Treemap hierarchically lays out each node as a bounding box; whose size is the same as the specific weight or attribute value of the node. After the original treemap algorithm called slice-and-dice, some extentions to it have been proposed: squatified treemap [2), ordered treemap [3] and quantum treemap [4]. In this paper, authors propose a new 3D visualization tool for hierarchical information called treecube that can be taken as a 3D extension of treemap. This tool seems very convenient for layouts of 3D objects in a specified, restricted 3D space. This paper explains the layout algorithm of treecube and shows its prospective application examples.