Space-scale animation: enhancing cross-scale understanding of multiscale structures in multiple views

Large information or model structures often span many scale levels, and exhibit important features at each scale. Having a coherent and cross-scale understanding of such multiscale structures often requires users to interact with the structures at different scales. While multiple views allow users to see the structures from different locations and at different scales, establishing cross-scale connections between structures in divergent multiple views could be a challenge. This paper proposes a new interactive design, space-scale animation, to visualize the spatial and semantic relationship between structures in different views, and discusses the design and implementation of space-scale animation as a dynamic view transition traversing space and scale. This research not only extends interactive animation techniques by explicitly considering the scale factor, but also argues the necessity to integrate cross-scale semantic information into animation to improve the understanding of complex structures.