

Fisheye Distortion with D3 - mgevans
http://bost.ocks.org/mike/fisheye/

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femto
Harry Beck used a fish eye distortion for this exact purpose, when he designed
the classic London Tube map in 1931. The scale is larger in the dense inner
city, where the stations are closer together, and smaller in the outer
suburbs, where the stations are further apart. The net effect is that the
density of the stations is roughly constant across the map.

[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Beck>

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______
It's great that the distortion isn't done on a pixel level but rather at the
object level -- it's mesmerizing to see the edges move ever so slightly when
mousing over a region

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tantalor
Yes, it's an interesting 3D effect. From the article,

> This is particularly useful for disambiguating edge-crossings in static
> layouts: edges between distant nodes are distorted more strongly than local
> ones.

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tantalor
It's funny how the objects at the edge of the distortion are compressed;
information here is lost rather than created. I'd rather see the distortion
spread to the image boundaries. Then I can still see the whole image, but
there is no weird annulus of compression.

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mbostock
Some compression is inevitable; to give space to some part of the
visualization, you must to take it away from somewhere else. But yeah, there
are variations of this approach that apply a global distortion rather than one
localized to the mouse. For example, click on "Distortions" then "Fisheye XY"
here:

<http://flare.prefuse.org/demo>

It'd be a nice feature to support multiple modes of distortion.

Also, you can open the JavaScript console and adjust the fisheye distortion
parameters. For example, you can make the area of distortion much bigger:

> fisheye.radius(480).power(4)

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colbyolson
Expected an article about Nikon hardware, but still enjoyed it.

The author has a lot of neat looking posts, I recommend giving them a look.

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chrisbroadfoot
I love the 3D effect, it really lets you get a feel for the data.

