Visualization of Two Parameters in a Three Dimensional Environment

Visualization techniques and tools allow a user to make sense of enormous amount of data. Querying capabilities and direct manipulation techniques enable a user to filter out irrelevant data and focus only on information that could yield to a conclusion. Effective visualization techniques should enable a user or an analyst to get to the conclusion in a short time and with minimal training. We illustrate, via three different research projects, how to visualize two parameters where a user can get to a conclusion in a very short amount of time with minimal or no training. The two parameters could be the relation of documents and their importance, or spatial events and their timing, or even the ration between carbon dioxide emission levels and number of trees per country. To accomplish this, we visualize the data in a three dimensional environment on a regular computer display. For data manipulation, we use techniques familiar to novice computer users.