Impetus / How Project Began

Ever larger collections of documents and non-numerical data are becoming accessible to casual users via powerful search and retrieval algorithms. For instance, a user's query to a search engine can often result in hundreds of potentially relevant documents. We believe that interactive 3D visualization techniques, used correctly, can be a powerful medium in which large amounts of abstract information can be comprehensibly presented, just has scientific visualization has been used to present large numeric data sets. The goal is to give users 1) a seamless view of text document result sets, at both a general and detailed level and 2) a powerful set of operations through which the user can organize, filter, and inspect groups of documents.