AniViz: A template-based animation tool for volume visualization

The AniViz tool for making visualization animations is based on two principles. First, it's desirable to directly turn the results of data exploration and visualization into animation content. Second, users can create a complex animation sequence by blending several simple effects. AniViz provides a set of motion templates; users create desirable effects as instances of those templates. It also provides a set of operators to edit an instance or combine multiple instances into a sequence of effects. Users can fine-tune parameters associated with an instance or a sequence in a keyframe style. Users can specify the length of each segment in the animation, or AniViz can automatically allocate the length on the basis of a distance metric. AniViz offers these functionalities through a simple, easy-to-use interface. The Web extra is a video that shows the author's animation tool, AniViz.