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Hyperbolic Trees
An Anonymous Reader writes "Well, this is not really news, but I've been playing with these things all day and they are so neat.
Inxight Has a couple Java demos of a Hyperbolic tree.
A New(?) UI concept from Xerox PARC. " requires Java,
and mine is busted. But maybe I'll fix that and toy with
that sorta thing for comments or something. Hmm.
Very cool.. this looks like something Apple was working on a few years ago, called Project X, later renamed to Hotsauce, I think. It was a mac application that let you surf through a hierarchical database, the demo came with one with lots of websites, like yahoo, but you could also drop your hard drive on it and surf through it this way. I found it on a MacAddict cd from 1996, and I can't find any mention of it anywhere on Apple's website.
paolo0@yahoo.com
Not new, the idea has been around for a while, at least back to 1992 (see the references in this related paper on hyperbolic web visualization).
Windows explorer is better.
These hyperbolic trees look good but fact of the matter is that if you have a lot of entries eg in your typical badly organised windows directories then having a linear list which is alphabetically ordered makes it a lot easier to find what you are looking for. Having a circle of things all crushed together is gonna be hard to read regardless of whether they are listed alphabetically clockwise/anticlockwise or not.
there's something else (windoze-only) called THE BRAIN.... see the FEED website for more details.
If only it wasn't Windoze-only! ... well, I know my C and my XLib, I should write something similar.... and form an Internet startup... and have a million-dollar IPO...
Didnt apple do something like this a couple years back?
One dictionary definition of hyperbolic is "related to hyperbole" or "making exaggerated claims". OK, who put the truth drug in Marketing's coffee?
Al used something like this, he wrote it,
back in 1992 to track contributions.
Called it "Al's big money tree".
Too modest to go commercial with it.
Yet again, a politician gets ripped off by
capitalist swine.
So Xerox has developed a potentially new user interface. If history repeats itself, (as it often does) Apple will steal it and be making money on it before Xerox has a chance to do anything with it. Now don't all you Mac kiddies start whining all at once. This was said for entertainment value, not to start (another) OS was on /.
The really bad thing about this hyberbolic tree
is that Xerox (Inxight) has patented the use of
hyberbolic functions in visualisation.
So you are not allowed to do anything like this!
This is a bad thing(tm)
This would be cool for cruising around my linux disk? Is there a x-windows version that will launch applications and inspect files?
Hard transfer limit reached
Yup, /.'d already.
Can you point to a patent reference on this?
Thanks.
An open letter from the Mac Kiddies:
Piffle on you, you elitist pig-dog!
Actually, an algorithm for most anything that is kinda cool in computing is:
while ($money != 0) {
Xerox invents something;
Mac steals it;
Microsoft produces an industry-standard, buggy pseudoclone;
while (Apple sues) {FSF boycotts Apple over another "look and feel" lawsuit;}
FSF boycotts Apple some more for the hell of it.;
GNU puts it on their list of priorities but nobody ever pays any attention to it;
Five other groups independantly develop subpar, Open Source versions of the same thing;
BeOS users wonder if a port will ever be made to their OS;
Amiga users ramble about how their systems supported it 10 years ago;
}
> ...maybe I'll fix that and toy with that sorta
> thing for comments or something. Hmm
I saw nothing there about how to make it fly,
short of downloading some AltaVista stuff, etc.
Are the source and docs somewhere to be found?
Or are these guys keeping it to themselves? (If
such be the case, I just completely lost
interest.)
now that is interesting
Is that what the Xanidu project's zigzag was meant to be ?
Damn. I've wanted to do a window manager like this for about eight years. Windows get smaller the more out of focus/off to the side they get pushed, and such.
Apple did this years ago. It was stupid then, too.
This "hyperbolic tree" reads like a combination of "cone trees" and "fisheye views" of graphs and maps. Fisheye views have been around a long time, as have "cone trees". Another interesting idea for browsing huge amounts of data is "infinitely zoomable" interfaces.
s /reports/CS-93-40.html s /reports/CS-91-61.html r eports/abstracts/src-rr-084a.htm 3 /93-Fisheye-FullZoom.GI/html/Fis
s /reports/CS-93-07.html l
Any or all of these could be used as the interface to GUIs that show large amounts of hierarchical data - web browsers, file managers, "File -> Open" pop-ups, filesystem defraggers, etc etc.
I blame Microsoft and Netscape for the dopey state of all of these things. Many examples of better visualizers abound, yet they both stick to the dumb little non-scaled trees that only let a user visualize a small tree of related items. If I didn't know better, I'd think that Microsoft only thought "in the small" and never considered that someone might have more than about 50 files in a directory, or 50 subdirectories of a directory.
I mean, for crying out loud, try to get a Windows user to understand "current working directory". You can't. They leave ".doc" files all over their disks.
Fisheye view papers:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/publications/techreport
http://www.cs.brown.edu/publications/techreport
http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/DEC/SRC/research-
http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/grouplab/papers/199
Cone tree papers:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/publications/techreport
http://iml.millersv.edu/work2/conetree/
http://iml.millersv.edu/SIGGRAPH_tree/paper.htm
Zooming User Interfaces:
http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/pad++/
I used it quite a bit, but eventually I decided it wasn't as good as a plain old yahoo-like text structure.
This one looks much better, but I'm still not sure it'd be faster or easier.
I used to work at the Geometry Center a few
years ago and I remember folks there were
doing tons of stuff with hyperbolic space
and hyperbolic trees. We ended up hooking
hyperbolic space capability into our
flagship 3D viewer which is available
under an open source compatible license.
Good thing we ported it to Linux! It
originally only ran on the SGI.
Download it, load up an object and try out
hyperbolic view for yourself!
http://www.geom.umn.edu/software/geomview/
-Daeron
Bullshit. He didn't write that any more than he "invented" the internet. Are you one of his lying publicists, or the liar himself?
Yes, please: it's a great idea!
The reason hyperbolic functions are used, is that no matter how irrelevant a piece of data, it will never be outside a certain finite viewable area. This is because hyperbolic functions do not explode the way parabolic functions do. You want the rate the info moves out from the center to DECREASE as it moves farther away; parabolic functions would increase.
Rather than using a hyperbolic function, why not just use a close linear approximation thereof?
If ya can't beat em, approximate 'em.
Actually, thinking this over more, Apple's Project X/Hotsauce (which used a 3D representation - objects getting farther away the less relevant they are) works just as well. The UI for exploring this data representation still needs some work - the actual controls, that is - i.e. a 3D version needs another axis of control (zoom in/out), and the controls in that hyperbolic thing were horribly clumsy. However, if Xerox is going to patent hyperbolic representation, there's still 3D representation, if you had a decent way to explore it (i.e. a "dataglove" type of thing, or something akin to that "Orb" 3D game controller)
I was at PARC in the late '80s and this
stuff was one of their Super Secret Projects.
Several very excellent people were doing
some very inspiring work on it. I doubt any
of them are still around.
Naturally, it being Xerox, it took ten years
to get out of the lab.
Naturally, Inxite being a Xerox spinoff, they
can't even get their web server to work. What
kind of amazing braindeath led them to put their
corporate web pages behind a quota? Yeah, I'm
going to go right out and buy their product.
http://www.thinkmap.com/ has a tree(java applet) that links to a thesaurus. Also Very Cool.. it can run in automatic mode jumping between linked words.
>If I didn't know better, I'd think that Microsoft only thought "in the small" and never considered ...
Sorry, but i couldn't let that one go by, just in case it was not meant sarcastically. Ever notice how scroll boxes are smallest (and non-resizeable) exactly when you need to use the space. Unfortunately (for us who have to use the stuff) they think in the small and market it as being the large. Very slow do the masses wise up to realize they have been had.
I worked at Apple; I work at Inxight. Apple did not invent this, Inxight's CTO did, along with a mathmetician, when they both worked as at Xerox PARC. There are seven patents in it, all owned by Xerox & Inxight. The original work was done several years ago (long before Hot Sauce). If you've seen the Hyperbolic Tree in other venues, it was a PARC demo or a licensee (a la M$) of Inxight.
yes it's not new, but that's because Inxight's been shipping it for more than 2 yrs. Microsoft is a licensee, not the inventor.
Nextstep did the scrollbar right. Never shrunk too small to manipulate.
BTW. My first impression when seeing this is, "pie-menu".
'500 user limit reached'
hanzie@hotbot.com
Why not just write it with a 3D representation, and then map it into hyperbolic space?
http://ruby.doc.ic.ac.uk/kensington/sc98_demo/full size/05_uk_man_tree.gif
Sorry to those who got the 500 server error on 3/19. Slashdot spiked our website visits by about 25x our previous high traffic record day, and of course we didn't know it was coming.
Thanks to you who did get a chance to try the Hyperbolic Tree and sent us comments.
Here's some facts to clarify some of the speculation in the posted comments on this site:
- Hyperbolic Tree is indeed not that new. The seminal paper, linked to from our site, was published in the 1995 CHI proceedings.
- Inxight was formed in 1997 to bring HT and a bunch of other PARC technologies to market.
- All three authors are still at PARC, with the exception of R. Rao, who is Inxight's CTO.
- If you've seen HT before, you saw it demo'd by PARC, or as a part of one of Inxight's licensee's products. That includes Microsoft's Site Analyst (in Site Server), WebTrends Enterprise Ed., Softquad's HotMetal Pro, etc., etc.
- Apple never had anything like HT. Hotsauce was a 3D fly-through product that never amounted to anything. I was at Apple at the time; I know.
- MCF (Meta Content Format) was invented by S.V. Guha when he was in Apple Avd. Tech. Group. He moved to Netscape and evolved MCF to RDF, the XML "application."
- AltaVista is an Inxight customer, having licensed HT and integrated into their Discovery client. They chose to support Windows only for their own (valid) reasons.
- We package and license HT as an ActiveX control and a JavaBean/Java class library, so we support any platform that can use those, including Linux.
- MagniFind is a file system navigator we whipped up quickly just to let people try HT on their desktops. We only had resources to support one platform, so far at least.
- YOU could make your own "MagniFind" for Linux if you licensed our JavaBean.
- We let non-profit orgs and educ. institutions use the applet for free. Slashdot.org would qualify, if anyone wants to take this up.
- HT is not Open Source, and it is heavily patented. Arguably, Xerox, our parent company, has already made a fair contribution to the world of computing through earlier work at PARC, no? This time, they'd like to benefit from it a little.
Steve Bernstein
Inxight Software
The world is as it is, not as you want to see it. How many websites actually ARE well-designed. Hardly any, because regular Joe's design 'em. I like a tool that brings at least order to the standard issue chaos.
Can anyone point me to this software? I can't seem to find it.
dmd@3e.org
--
The Usenet one is especially neet.
click in the blank areas to refocus the view in that direction.
The hard access limit for this user has been reached
"TIMBER!!!!!!" *crash*
Come on! It'd make navigating comments so much easier! And think! You could color code comments based on their score! ;)
Posted by WVG:
Looks pretty good but it's not new, like others I've seen it before but then it gives you a good quick look around a site with all possible links to attend. Cool stuff.
"Site Manager" on SGI's looks just like this. Actually, much nicer, as it's realtime shaded OpenGL... :) "Fsn" is nice too - the file manager seen in Jurassic Park - another fly-through OpenGL app. This concept doesn't strike me as anything "new."
It's not new, this stuff is used in one of Microsoft's IIS web analysis tools. It's VERY cool. I had always been extremely skeptical of any software that said it could 'map' a web site -- the tree structures you build with web links are very rarely simple enough to render easily. But the hyperbolic tree scheme works quite well.
I navigate to "rec", and then I can't see any of the subhierarchies of rec - they all end up off the screen.
This hyperbolic thing is fun and nifty, but I don't see it as being very useful at all.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
But you can't see the subhierarchies so you can't tell which blank area to click on to bring the view over the rec.photo, for instance, so you have to keep trying until you find the right one.
Like I said, a toy.
And it doesn't do a good job with web sites because web sites are an interconnected "web" (hey, amazing how that works) rather than a strict heirarchy.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Yes, it's been around for a while - I've seen various implementations of it, although I think this is the best that I've seen in terms of features.
I wrote a nice backend in Perl that can feed one of these Java applets with the structures that it requires. It's nice to see a good way to mix Java and Perl - let Java do nice graphical client stuff, and have Perl/LWP doing what it's best at at the backend.
-----
Does anyone know of something (preferably a library) for doing a similar thing, but as maps (the geometric term) instead of a tree style?
"In true sound..." -Agents of Good Root
Not CDF, RDF. RDF is making its way through the W3C now, and is the technology behind the new My Netscape channel format. Mozilla definitely has some sort of RDF support, though I doubt that it has flythroughs or hyperbolic trees or anything. As a historical note, the work that eventually became MCF/Hotsauce and RDF began in the CYC AI project.
The Brain (for Windows) is available from http://www.thebrain.com. I am working on a similar program (for Linux and the PalmPilot) called Synapse. The Pilot version is available now, and I'm working on the Linux version. For more info, see my web page at http://www4.ncsu.edu/~bgdarnel/synapse/
Actually, I am writing an Open Source program similar to the Brain (for Linux and the PalmPilot). It's called Synapse, and you can find out more at http://www4.ncsu.edu/~bgdarnel/synapse/. The Pilot version is available now, and I'm working on the Linux version.
Any mirrors for this particular display? Some of us virgin-pure souls haven't seen the IIS analysis tools, so there's no context in which to understand the comments above.
I think not...(*poof*)
for more info on HotSouce/MCF... this was picked off of the Java Interface... go here Art icle
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
I was able to get in briefly before getting this error, and after your comment was posted to Slashdot. I wonder if it's per hour, or per client, or what?
I still think it's time Slashdot came up with an httpd accelerator for all of the links it's pointing at.
Maybe I'll make a Gtk+ widget for a hyperbolic tree. It could essentially work like a tree widget, but on a larger scale. Good idea?
Yes, I'm still a junky. Are you still a bitch?
The main guy behind Hotsauce left Apple for Netscape to work on CDF amd Metadata (not sure about the acronym though). His work lives on in that spec.
Gecko should have some of these capabilities too.
Can you post a link for FSN? I hadn't realized
that that was a real GUI. Coolness.
gigantino.tv - Heavy but weighs nothing.
I just felt like being a dick like all the other people who have taken the time to say "this is not new."
I love how 1 or 2 people say something is not new, and then everyone that posts has to say the same. So, "its not new."
Who cares if its not new when its cool? Its new on slashdot
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Great to hear. Post the code, and maybe it will be developed faster.
This thing has been on Xerox's site for years now. :) Certainly not new.
Did they remove the limit?
So - it's just like those mindmap thingies they tried to have us use in school. Neat, but not new.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Xerox PARC originally did this for file systems. I nearly did my undergrad project on it. That would be 4 years ago, and it was not new then. Its neat though.
This is kind of likeThe Brain.
I used it a lot when I used M$. I liked it a lot, and I miss it. It was absolutely the most useful information organization tool I've ever encountered.
It even saved info in notes area automatically evertime you type so that when M$ froze, you would still have all your data.
I think there is a linux version "Synapse" in the works, but it's not complete, and has a way to go (I believe). They have a Palm version becoming stable IIRC.
He's got the GTK app for linux that will more or less to what The Brain does, except do it, in html instead of RTF.
I've followed his mail list for some time. And he knows what he's doing. He's GPLing it, maybe he could use collaborators... Check it out.
Is there some place where we can download a "free" version of a hyperbolic tree java class?
The Brain is one of the more useful tools I've come across. Haven't tried it under Wine yet, but when you're dealing with hundreds of slivers of information, it helps a lot. (I don't really see any particular reason it shouldn't work under WINE, but...) :)
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
web navigation is only one of many ways to use hyperbolic tree. The Inxite applett is being used where I work to navigate databases and to build database queries. This is really cool stuff.
All these comments about how this is useful.. I agree... I think it would really be nice for utilities like CHEOPS.
And if it supports recursive trees (read cyclic) then it would be pretty nice for a man page reader and a web site browser (like LINBOT).
That would mean of course that we would need a GTK port. Doesn't sound impossible, or even that hard. And I would definitely use it.
Anybody game for coding this one up? Sounds like a GOOD, SHORT TERM, free software project, same license as GTK (of course).
Well, this may not be all bad. I would imagine that they don't have a patent on everything that looks remotely similar. So instead of a hyberbolic function, We can modify the domain and make it a parabolic function or something like that. It won't be the same, but it would probably be just as effective (and comfortable) for the user.
If we write an open source version of this, can we call it Pinky?
Narf!
It looks like Hotsauce/ProjectX still exists...
yeah, I'd like to know that too.
I just made it in.
What determines the score your comment recieves?
My microbes must have translated that wrong! - Aeryn Sun
ACs get a default score of 0. Logins get a default score of 1. The moderators can decrease the score to -1 to hide flames and pointless posts. I presume that the moderators can increase a score, but I haven't seen an example of it in practice.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
yeah, i remember this from the IIS web site analysis tool. it's cool to see it working as a java applet, though.
i can't believe that it's particularly revolutionary. even before the IIS tool came around, i'm sure i've seen stuff like this before.
-- in china, chinese food is just called food.
Damn, you stole my idea. :(
Now all we need is someone to make one in [C C++ ObjC Perl Python SCHEME]
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
That's pretty neat. Worth a look (if your java works).
Natrificial has a product called The Brain that is similar except consumer-oriented. I tried it out a while ago for a couple of days.
Mmm... and then we could try to take over the world.
--c
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
Ohhh, I thought the "500 ... hard limit reached" msg was originating from my employer's [stupid] firewall (on account of my having downloaded the Trailer2 and such! :-), but I'm logged in on my personal login, and I just got that msg when trying to get to this site.
:-}
{Sorry if this is a stupid question. I'm not too well-versed on web admin stuff. Actually, to be honest, I'm pretty damned ignorant of it!
Anyway, when you see that "500" msg, is it just a matter of trying again repeatedly, or does it mean that the server panicked* and there's no point in trying again for a while?
* I hate spelling that word that way. It really oughta be "paniced", but that doesn't look much better! *sigh*
--
Mark Conty
mdc@isd.net
Mark Conty
mconty@integra.net
In the preceding article about flexible keyboards, there was a reply by Anonymous Coward that included prices, and its score was set to 2. Haven't seen too many of those...
--
Mark Conty
mdc@isd.net
Mark Conty
mconty@integra.net
I don't like it. And I fear that things such as this will encourage poor site construction.
A well-designed site shouldn't need a tool like this to be able to find what you are looking for quickly.
The chain of idea theft in this space is long... Xerox /probably/ stole this from Apple, who /definatly/ stole the idea from the work of a couple of MIT Media Lab Researchers, Lisa Strausfeld and some other guy. They went on to form a company called Perspecta www.perspecta.com which has strayed far from the visualization fold since it was founded (they now do this OLAP for the web thing).
Hard access limit has been reached for this user.
*sigh*
The Inxight applet is certainly cleaner, though.
Hey, while I'm at it, www.thebrain.com is a similar graph viewer.
The main force of H.T. is drawing links without having them cross each other. Things near the root are easy to access, for the rest you need to go all the way through the web. I suggest you try Umap Web at www.umap.com . Unfortunately, for Windows only...
I say someone should throw in another axis (z) and add support for another mouse and have a "grab/pull" shell for windows (or Linux,etc...)
At work we are just starting to impliment it. The best is the cost... try ~$30,000 to start and then like ~$80,000 for it to work on our 600,000 plus links and then 15% a year for support... but it is worth it... navigation of complex biological philums and the sort is great through this interface... even cooler in my mind is their linguistic tools... the summarizer is our next purchase... thing is I have this odd feeling I have seen this design before, like 3 years ago and on some waco freinds unix box... hummm