Automatic Transitional Animation Between Visualizations

We present a generic framework for animating between different visualizations using polygon morphing. The motivation for this work arises from using many different visualization techniques (e.g. scatter plots, parallel coordinates, etc.) to view complex, multi-dimensional data. When transitioning from a visual representation that the user is familiar with to one that is new or one that the user is unfamiliar with, the semantics of the new representation are not always clear. We provide a tool that can be used as a learning aid for a user to use their understanding of one representation to learn a new one. Using the Prefuse toolkit [7] we have implemented a tool that allows developers to easily create two or more representations and animate between them without explicitly describing paths or shapes in the animation.