Minimally-immersive interactive volumetric information visualization

This paper describes a minimally immersive volumetric interactive system for information visualization. The system, SFA, uses glyph-based volume rendering, enabling more information attributes to be visualized than traditional 2D and surface-based information visualization systems. Two-handed interaction and stereoscopic viewing combine to produce a minimally immersive interactive system that enhances the user's three-dimensional perception of the information space, capitalizing on the human visual systems; pre-attentive learning capabilities to quickly analyse the displayed information. We describe the usefulness of this system for the visualization of document similarity within a corpus of textual documents. SFA allows the three-dimensional volumetric visualization, manipulation, navigation, and analysis of multivariate, time-varying information spaces, increasing the quantity and clarity of information conveyed from the visualization as compared to traditional 2D information systems.