Visual Exploration of Complex Information Spaces through Coherent Dynamic Textual Annotations

Scientific and technical textbooks, documentations and visual dictionaries should convey fairly complex subject matters in an easy-to-understand way. These types of learning materials heavily rely on illustrations to achieve various tasks in parallel: 1. Introduce a large amount of unknown terms either in a domain-specific or foreign language, 2. Explain complicated spatial configurations, 3. Provide classifications and descriptions for domain entities, and 4. Pin-point the reader's attention at important features in the illustration. Therefore, these illustrations are carefully tuned to the above-mentioned communicative functions. Moreover, the illustrations have to be coordinated with the associated text segments. This is mainly achieved by establishing links between visual and textual elements. In practice, human illustrators employ a number of techniques: Labels, legends, and figure captions which provide denotations, technical terms, and descriptions for visual elements. An interactive 3D browser is well suited to explore complex spatial configurations (Task 2) and can ease the mental integration of visual and textual information (Task 1, 3) through a synchronized object selection and highlighting mechanism (Task 4). Moreover, the properties of the visual elements viewing direction, graphical emphasis techniques) as well as the layout of the visual and textual element can be adjusted according to the user specific requirements. This scenario raises a challenging dynamic layout problem which has to be solved by automated and real-time layout algorithms. This talk presents a novel system that integrates 3D information with dynamic textual annotations. It presents real-time layout algorithms for annotation placement. The demo compares several implemented layout styles with their hand-drawn counterparts in order to demonstrate the flexibility of the system.