| > made each parameter interpolable, turning our engine into a generic chart morpher that can continuously interpolate between any charts that can be described on its interface. After that, we analyzed these transitions and came up with rules that make them self-explanatory and easy to follow for the viewers, and finally, we embedded these rules into the engine. Clever! An interesting approach. Lots of data vis lib builders (myself included) have added half-baked chart type transitions, but always as a tertiary concern. It usually comes out not so impressive. Your examples look lovely. It seems like you are betting that there is demand for animated chart types if done much better, and so your focus on that as a first concern may lead you to some new primitives that others have missed. Years ago I made a similar run but not as sophisticated, eventually dropping animations and building my own static charting lib (and then even dropping that, and making my focus the Studio/Language). I gave up on animations for 3 reasons: 1) The most immediate was during dev time staring at animating charts all day started to give me migraines. May have just been a coincidence, but there were definitely patterns of animation that you don't encounter in nature ever, so I wasn't sure if it was visually healthy. 2) Microsoft's SandDance (https://microsoft.github.io/SandDance/app/) blew me away. I was working from a similar first principle: always show all the data particles and higher level shapes (like bars/circles/etc) are just particles aggregating together. Mine was 2-D only though and much slower. 3) I figured if SandDance wasn't gaining too much traction, as amazing as it is, perhaps there wasn't so much demand for that approach. Maybe you'll discover something different. Are there certain scenarios where you think your animations will allow telling a better story? Your example page is nice, but I don't see examples of the animations adding value to a story. Or do you think that animations are helpful mostly during EDA, and not at story telling time? In my iterations I eventually realized making the data pipelines orthogonal to the visualization was the better architecture (basically copying dplyr in Javascript). This seems to be the way most of the JS data vis world is heading now, with Arquero and Observable heading that way. Is that possible with your lib, or do transforms have to be tightly coupled because of the animation component? |
Using dplyr with Vizzu seems possible - at least at first sight we actually do very similar transformations of the data .