Interactive Lenses for Visualization: An Extended Survey

The elegance of using virtual interactive lenses to provide alternative visual representations for selected regions of interest is highly valued, especially in the realm of visualization. Today, more than 50 lens techniques are known in the closer context of visualization, far more in related fields. In this article, we extend our previous survey on interactive lenses for visualization. We propose a definition and a conceptual model of lenses as extensions of the classic visualization pipeline. An extensive review of the literature covers lens techniques for different types of data and different user tasks and also includes the technologies employed to display lenses and to interact with them. We propose a taxonomy for lenses in visualization and illustrate its utility by dissecting in detail a multi-touch lens for exploring large graph layouts. As a conclusion of our review, we identify challenges and unsolved problems to be addressed in future research.