[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.

[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)