Evaluating Animated Transitions between Contiguous Visualizations for Streaming Big Data

An approach to analyzing Streaming Big Data as it comes in while maintaining the proper context of past events is to employ contiguous visualizations with an increasingly aggressive aggregation degree. This allows for the most recent data to be displayed in detail, while older data is shown in an aggregated form according to how long ago it was received. However, the transitions applied between visualizations with different aggregations must not compromise the understandability of the data flow. Particularly, new data should be perceived considering the context established by older data, and the visualizations should not be perceived as independent or un-connected. In this paper, we present the first study on transitions between two contiguous visualizations, focusing on time series data. We developed several animated transitions between a scatter plot, where all data points are individually represented as they arrive, and other visualizations where data is displayed in an aggregated form. We then conducted a user evaluation to assess the most appealing and effective transitions that allow for the best comprehension of the displayed data for each visualization pair.