(Images generated by SDM)

The aim of SDM is to provide users with a high degree of selectivity and object dynamics while manipulating visualizations to analyze and explore diverse information. It does this by giving users freedom in manipulating 2D and 3D objects while providing constraints and feedback to prevent confusion. In support of this, SDM allows flexible control of any object parameter. One example of this is shown in these three figures. In the figure above, many of the selected objects (shown in green) are occluded and it is difficult to analyze them as a set.

Using SDM, selected objects can be elevated over the scene, thus eliminating occlusion while maintaining context, as in the left figure below. Users can also accomplish the same goal by shifting selecting objects horizontally, as in the right figure. These two figures also demonstrate that spatial shift operations are also useful for creating subsets of objects in the visualization. Spatial shift operations maintain relative positions, and thus can be manipulated separately to view patterns within them.

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