Animating Treemaps

Treemaps have so far been used to display static views of hierarchical information mainly for exploratory purposes. Most of the time, the data at hand are multivariate and the user is often interested in seeing alternative views of the same hierarchy by changing the visible variables used for weighing or filling. Consequently, some areas of the display shrink while other areas expand so much so that the transition between the alternative views of the same hierarchy are impossible to follow. This paper describes early attempts at using animation with two treemap layouts.