This report describes a variety of 3D interactive graphics techniques for visualizing programs. The third dimension provides an extra degree of freedom for conveying information, much as color adds to black-and-white images, animation adds to static images, and sound adds to silent animations. The examples in this report illustrate three fundamental uses of 3D: for providing additional information about objects that are intrinsically two-dimensional, for uniting multiple views, and for capturing a history of execution. The application of dynamic three-dimensional graphics to program visualization is largely unexplored. A videotape of these animations is available.

Abstract not found

This paper describes fractal approaches to the problems which associate with visualizing huge hierarchies. The geometrical characteristic of a fractal, selfsimilarity, allows users to visually interact with a huge tree in the same manner at every level of the tree. The fractal dimension, a measure of complexity, makes it possible to control the total amount of displayed nodes. A prototype visualization system for UNIX directories is also shown. 1 Introduction Visualization systems for hierarchical structures, especially for huge 1 data structures, have a potential usefulness. For example, the visualization of whole UNIX directories might help system administrators to maintain the file systems. Since administrators could recognize, through the visualization, local file systems of each computer and remote file systems mounted by using NFS (Network File System), they might avoid mistakes, such as deleting or moving files which are being referenced by other computers. It is, however, m...

ing methods; fractals; information visualization; program display; UI theory 1. INTRODUCTION As computer systems evolve, the capability of restoring and managing information increases more and more. At the same time, computer users must view increasing amounts of information through video displays which are physically limited in size. Displaying information 1 effectively is a main concern in many software applications. For example, in visual programming systems[Shu 1988], graphic representations become very complex if the number of visual elements increases. In hypertext 1 The word "information" is used as a structured set of primitive elements which is specific to each application. Author's address: 481 Minor Hall, School of Optometry, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-2020. email: koike@milo.berkeley.edu; (permanent address: Graduate School of Information Systems, University of Electro-Communications, 1--5--1, Chofugaoka, Chofu, Tokyo 182, Japan. email: koike@cas.uec.a...

In this paper we address the problem of finding the best viewpoints for three-dimensional straight-line graph drawings. We define goodness in terms of preserving the relational structure of the graph, and develop two continuous measures of goodness under orthographic parallel projection. We develop Voronoi variants to find the best viewpoints under these measures, and present results on the complexity of these diagrams.

This paper appears as Technical Report 95-07, Department of Computer Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle NSW 2308 Australia.

This paper descN4 es JCAT, a web-based algorithm animation system. JCATc ombines the expressive power of web pages for publishing passive multimedia cD tent with a fullfledged

. In this paper we present an algorithm for 3-D orthogonal drawing of arbitrary degree n-vertex m-edge multigraphs with O(m 2 = p n) bounding box volume and 6 bends per edge route. This is the smallest known bound on the bounding box volume of 3-D orthogonal multigraph drawings. We continue the study of the tradeoff between bounding box volume and the number of bends in orthogonal graph drawings through a refined algorithm with O(m 2 ) bounding box volume and 5 bends per edge route. Many open problems in 3-D orthogonal graph drawing are presented and potential avenues for their solution are discussed. 1 Introduction With applications including VLSI circuit design [4, 18, 20] and software engineering [14, 19, 23], there has been recent interest in 3-D graph visualization. Proposed models include straight-line drawings [6, 13, 16] and of interest in this paper orthogonal drawings [1, 2, 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 15, 17, 25, 26, 27, 28]. The 3-D orthogonal grid consists of grid po...

This paper considers a 3-dimensional visibility representation of cliques K n . In this representation, the objects representing the vertices are 2dimensional and lie parallel to the x; y-plane, and two vertices of the graph are adjacent if and only if their corresponding objects see each other by a line of sight parallel to the z-axis that intersects the interiors of the objects. In particular, we represent vertices by unit discs and by discs of arbitrary radii (possibly different for different vertices); we also represent vertices by axis-aligned unit squares, by axis-aligned squares of arbitrary size (possibly different for different vertices), and by axis-aligned rectangles. We present: ffl a significant improvement (from 102 to 55) of the best known upper bound for the size of cliques representable by rectangles or squares of arbitrary size; ffl a sharp bound for the representation of cliques by unit squares (K 7 can be represented but K n for n ? 7 cannot); ffl a r...

3D visualizations of software can be used to highlight relationships between system compo-nents, and also allow focussing on the internals of software, particularly when applied to object oriented software. Such visualizations allow software engineers to comprehend larger software systems, due to more information being available through the use of a third dimen-sion. An architecture has been designed to carry out such visualizations. Major features of this architecture are a meta language to describe object oriented systems, a description language to generate generic visualizations, and an automated pipeline for generating visual-izations. Using this architecture, several visualizations have been generated and analysed, to