Canis: A High‐Level Language for Data‐Driven Chart Animations

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Canis, a high‐level domain‐specific language that enables declarative specifications of data‐driven chart animations. By leveraging data‐enriched SVG charts, its grammar of animations can be applied to the charts created by existing chart construction tools. With Canis, designers can select marks from the charts, partition the selected marks into mark units based on data attributes, and apply animation effects to the mark units, with the control of when the effects start. The Canis compiler automatically synthesizes the Lottie animation JSON files [Aira], which can be rendered natively across multiple platforms. To demonstrate Canis’ expressiveness, we present a wide range of chart animations. We also evaluate its scalability by showing the effectiveness of our compiler in reducing the output specification size and comparing its performance on different platforms against D3.

AniVis: Generating Animated Transitions Between Statistical Charts with a Tree Model

“…Although prior research has either derived design guidelines and principles through user studies [10,12,15,44] or designed and developed animation effects to support transitions between specific visualizations in an ad-hoc manner [4,17,23,28,46], there are few automated approaches for formulating the design process of animated transitions to convey data relations between general statistical charts. Recent work for specifying data graphics animations with high-level declarative languages [21,29] provides a simpler grammar than D3 [8] and gganimate [36] for the user.…”

“…Recently, increasing efforts have been devoted to authoring chart animations [20,21,29,43]. For example, Ge et al [21] introduce a high-level grammar, called Canis, which enables declarative specifications of data-driven chart animations.…”

“…Recently, increasing efforts have been devoted to authoring chart animations [20,21,29,43]. For example, Ge et al [21] introduce a high-level grammar, called Canis, which enables declarative specifications of data-driven chart animations. Their approach requires professional knowledge of the languages and detailed planning of the transitions between the start and end states.…”

Improving Engagement of Animated Visualization with Visual Foreshadowing

“…We see visual foreshadowing as a new form of animation effect that appears before the critical events during the playback of animated visualization to set the viewer's expectations. Basing from previous research on animation [17], we define visual foreshadowing for animated visualization from three perspectives, namely, visual effect, timing, and duration. Accordingly, visual foreshadowing can be formalized as a 3-tuples:…”

Gemini2: Generating Keyframe-Oriented Animated Transitions Between Statistical Graphics

“…However, authoring animated transitions between statistical graphics is not trivial; animation authors must implement low-level movements by writing code that considers many design variations, such as staging and timing. Recently, researchers have facilitated this authoring experience using a non-programming interfaces [26] or domain-specific languages [9]. However, authors must still manually generate animation keyframes or specify changes by selecting low-level graphic components.…”