Me and my colleague Domonkos had a chance to work on a very interesting project: “PolyZoom: Multiscale and Multifocus Exploration in 2D Visual Spaces“. In simple words: the paper provides a novel hierarchical way of navigating through maps, which makes sure the user does not lose the context, and preserves both multiscale and multifocus awareness while navigating.
The paper itself is a very interesting read, and you can check a demo from the original publishers here:
We had a chance to implement the approach, and try to add some enhancements to it. The main drawback of this approach is the reduced viewport (map view) size: the more map views you add, the smaller each one gets. However, this problem can not be solved. Another problem was that the application full screen was never fully utilized, which means there is a lot of wasted space,especially when you focus one of the ports as seen in the video and it gets bigger. We tried to avoid this problem by focusing the viewport by only making the viewport thicker, and not enlarging it. This would still attract the users’ attention, while utilizing the whole view. We also removed the lines connecting parent to child viewport, and we show it only when you navigate in child viewport.
A live demo of our implementation can be seen here. (for Chrome)
Bonus: we added multiple datasets; we added the moon, the sky, and Mars. Feel free to wander around them.
Engineering The Design 