Information Visualization: Growing Up or Drying Up?
Keith Andrews
IICM, Graz University of Technology
Austria
kandrews@iicm.edu
For my angle on this panel, let me formulate some issues and questions I have been thinking about recently.
Where are we?
Several dozen visualization techniques for various types of information have now been proposed and/or implemented. Are we starting to run out of ideas? Paper submissions for the InfoVis symposium have gone from 37 in 1995 to 33 in 1996 to 28 in 1997. It appears to be getting harder to dream up something truly new; the design space is getting crowded. This is perhaps a sign of maturity, but may also mean we are damned forever to publishing deltas to existing techniques...
On another tack, many of the more interesting visualization techniques are proprietary and patented: Cone Trees, FSN, Hyperbolic Browser, to name a few. Are we about to enter a legal/licensing minefield when looking to apply or extend these or similar techniques?
Where do we go from here?
Everyone seems to be racking their brains to dream up *the* next cool visualization, which I suppose is understandable since that is where the glory (and patent) lies.
Is anyone doing comparative studies of the various published techniques for particular tasks? The CHI'97 Great Browse Off, a live contest between several hierarchical navigation techniques, was highly entertaining, but a more formal study would be very welcome.
Thoughts, opinions... ?