Fisheye View for Visualization of Large Tree by Packing Nested Circles

A new fisheye view is described for the visualization of large scale hierarchical data using nested circles.A distortion function is constructed first,then a layout algorithm for the distorted brother nodes and a recursive algorithm for the children nodes of the distorted nodes are described.In order to represent the hierarchical information structures more explicitly,a mapping method from 2D fisheye view to 3D fisheye view is proposed.The new method has been applied to the visualization of file systems.Experimental results show that by the method,it is easy to see both local focus and global context simultaneously,and the method shows highly task completion efficiency and user satisfaction.