An Interface for Visualization Animations

In the communication of scientific studies and findings, animations are often more effective than still images for showing and explaining complex, dynamic processes, relationships, and structures hidden in the data. AniViz is a tool for making visualization animations. The design of AniViz is mainly based on two principles. First, it is desirable to directly turn the results of data exploration and visualization into the content of an animation that displays the most relevant aspects of the data. That is, AniViz allows the user to make animations
while exploring the data. Second, a complex animation sequence may be created by blending several simple effects. AniViz provides a set of motion templates for the user to create desirable effects as instances of those templates,
which include overview, spatial, temporal, variable, and transfer function domain exploration, highlighting, slicing,
etc. Furthermore, AniViz provides the user with a set of operators to edit an instance or combine multiple ones into a sequence of effects. The user can fine tune parameters associated with an instance or a sequence in a keyframe style. The length of each segment in the animation may be specified by the user or automatically allocated by AniViz based on a distance metric. AniViz offers these functionalities through a simple and easy-to-use interface, which may be adopted by existing visualization systems.