Gemini2: Generating Keyframe-Oriented Animated Transitions Between Statistical Graphics
This work addresses the challenge of designing clear animated transitions in data visualization, which is an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The authors tackled the problem of creating understandable animated transitions between statistical graphics by developing Gemini2, a system that automatically recommends intermediate keyframes for staged animations. They found that Gemini2's recommendations aligned well with human preferences and could generate favorable animations that their prior system could not support.
Complex animated transitions may be easier to understand when divided into separate, consecutive stages. However, effective staging requires careful attention to both animation semantics and timing parameters. We present Gemini2, a system for creating staged animations from a sequence of chart keyframes. Given only a start state and an end state, Gemini2 can automatically recommend intermediate keyframes for designers to consider. The Gemini2 recommendation engine leverages Gemini, our prior work, and GraphScape to itemize the given complex change into semantic edit operations and to recombine operations into stages with a guided order for clearly conveying the semantics. To evaluate Gemini2's recommendations, we conducted a human-subject study in which participants ranked recommended animations from both Gemini2 and Gemini. We find that Gemini2's animation recommendation ranking is well aligned with subjects' preferences, and Gemini2 can recommend favorable animations that Gemini cannot support.