Automated design of virtual worlds for visualizing multivariate relations

Interactive visualization systems provide a powerful means to explore complex data, especially when coupled with 3-D interaction and display devices to produce virtual worlds. While designing a quality static 2-D visualization is already a difficult task for most users, designing an interactive 3-D one is even more challenging. To address this problem, AutoVisual, a research system that designs interactive virtual worlds for visualizing and exploring multivariate relations of arbitrary arity, is being developed. AutoVisual uses worlds within worlds, an interactive visualization technique that exploits nested, heterogeneous coordinate systems to map multiple variables onto each spatial dimension. AutoVisual's designs are guided by user-specified visualization tasks, and by a catalog of design principles encoded using a rule-based language.<>