Gemini: A Grammar and Recommender System for Animated Transitions in Statistical Graphics

Animated transitions help viewers follow changes between related visualizations. Specifying effective animations demands significant effort: authors must select the elements and properties to animate, provide transition parameters, coordinate timing of stages. To facilitate this process, we present Gemini, a declarative grammar recommendation system for animated single-view statistical graphics. Gemini specifications define “steps” in terms high-level visual components (marks, axes, legends) composition rules synchronize concatenate steps. With grammar, can recommend animation designs augment accelerate designers' work. enumerates staged given start end states, ranks those using cost function informed by prior perceptual studies. evaluate conduct both formative study on Mechanical Turk assess tune our ranking function, summative which 8 experienced visualization developers implement D3 that then compare Gemini's suggestions. We find most (9/11) are exactly replicable with many (8/11) achievable via edits suggestions, suggestions avoid multiple participant errors.