[Sigia-l] Information Visualization

[Listera]

"Karl Fast" wrote:

> Obviously I think it will go the other way. I don't necessarily
> think it will become the dominant interaction paradigm the way
> hypertext has, but I do believe we are still in the early stages.

That's pretty irrational and I'm not using that term in any derogatory way.
It's irrational because you seem to be saying some stuff takes much longer
than others to percolate and information visualization is one of them. And
that someday, some killer app/method will magically raise its profile
fundamentally.

Now contrast that with the Web. For those of us who were 'online' before
Mosaic, it was very easy to both understand and to demonstrate the enormous
potential of the web. Anyone with more than 17 brain cells (OK, except for
those in denial and/or working at a certain Redmond campus :-) could
immediately see the potential. Yes, certain things such as compression,
markup language, page rendering, bandwidth, etc., had to be improved but
this was all 'knowable' and straightforward. What had to be done was
obvious. 

I had the same feeling when I first saw a beta of what was to become
QuickTime. Yes, it was postage stamp size, but you knew that codecs will
eventually take care of the problem. And they did; today QT Pixlet does an
amazing job of displaying High-Definition video.

On the other hand, QuickTime VR was equally exciting and promising when
first introduced, but failed to create more widespread traction.
 
So do you see any clear path to information visualization success? Stuff
that need to worked out? Or are you simply holding on to an irrational hope
that it will/should succeed, because it would be neat if it did? (Again,
nothing wrong with that, as many breakthroughs come via irrational
fixations.) 

----
Ziya

The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a
large matter--it's the difference between the lightning bug and the
lightning.