Browsing EuroVis06: Joint Eurographics - IEEE VGTC Symposium on Visualization by Subject "Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS): H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems, I.4.8 [Image Processing and Computer Vision]: Scene Analysis, H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces"
(The Eurographics Association, 2006) Haroz, Steve; Ma, Kwan-Liu; Beatriz Sousa Santos and Thomas Ertl and Ken Joy
This paper demonstrates the prevalence of a shared characteristic between visualizations and images of nature. We have analyzed visualization competitions and user studies of visualizations and found that the more preferred, better performing visualizations exhibit more natural characteristics. Due to our brain being wired to perceive natural images [SO01], testing a visualization for properties similar to those of natural images can help show how well our brain is capable of absorbing the data. In turn, a metric that finds a visualization s similarity to a natural image may help determine the effectiveness of that visualization. We have found that the results of comparing the sizes and distribution of the objects in a visualization with those of natural standards strongly correlate to one s preference of that visualization.