Starfield: the next generation

Operators could easily be overwhelmed by the enormous amount of data generated by today´s increasingly complex systems. An operator of a very large facility, for example, might scan through displays of numerous floor plans or hundreds of thousands of lines of text, but since the typical human mind “cannot absorb pure data” (de Bono, 1980), a next-generation interface is needed that paves the way from data to information and beyond. Abstraction, a method used to deal with complexity, provides one such route. The Starfield, an interface based on metaphorical abstraction, effectively reduces the state of a complex system to a directly perceived pattern. In one effort to create more informationally dense Starfields, the points of information of adjacent displayed systems were allowed to overlap. This paper introduces several visualization tools that reduce visual clutter and resolve ambiguity, thereby helping operators interpret more informationally dense Starfields