[ the FAD Toolkit ]

The FAD Toolkit is the result of extensive investigation into visualization using nonlinear magnification. This toolkit provides a library of sophisticated and efficient nonlinear magnification routines, and also implements user interfaces for interactive manipulation of magnification transformations across a range of domain tasks. This page is the original page for the magnification technology as it was first developed back in 1996-98. The technology has since matured and been commercialized. It is now licensed and used by a wide number of organizations, and is available through a licensing arrangement with Visualytics, LLC

[ Background | Toolkit | Applications | Videos ]

Nonlinear Magnification

 Nonlinear magnification is a term that reflects the fundamental process that is central to the many techniques which have been described in the literature under such names as "fisheye views" "distortion-oriented presentation" and "focus+context". The basic characteristics of nonlinear magnification are non-occluding in-place magnification which preserves a view of the global context. A Brief Tour of Nonlinear Magnification provides an overview of some of the effects that can be achieved with nonlinear magnification.

Toolkit and Availability

 The FAD toolkit provides a modular pipeline-based system for constructing complex nonlinear magnification transformations. Data-flow through this pipeline is very efficient, and performance of several million point-transformations per second has been acheived on desktop systems (several orders of magnitude beyond published numbers for similar existing systems). The transformation routines are written in C++ and provide a portable set of libraries for use in other applications. For the example applications given here, OpenGL is used as the graphics API, and Mark Kilgard's GLUT implementation provides the windowing and user-interaction interface.

Although the FAD toolkit has been made available on a restricted basis in the past, there is currently no free version available. The toolkit has been licensed by Visualytics for further development and commercialization in battlespace visualization and management, intelligence analysis, and numerous other applications. Please visit their website for information about using nonlinear magnification technology in your application.

Applications

Here are a few applications to which the FAD Toolkit has been applied.

Movies Illustrating 2D Transformations

 The following QuickTime movies illustrate some basic techniques for nonlinear magnification. The movies have been downsampled and given a high compression rate in order to keep the file size down. The image quality is degraded because of this, but is still quite adequate for seeing the effects of the transformations