Collapsible Cylindrical Trees (CCT) are a novel visualization and interaction technique for medium-sized trees. Child nodes are mapped on rotating cylinders, which will be dynamically displayed or hidden to achieve a useful balance of detail and context. Besides a comprehensible three-dimensional visualization of trees, the main feature of CCT is a very fast and intuitive interaction with the displayed nodes. Only a single click is needed to reach every node and perform an action on it, such as displaying a web page. The CCT browsing technique was developed for interaction with web hierarchies but is not limited to this domain.
The picture below shows the stretching effect as a result of opening several subhierarchies. We developed two different implementations in VRML 2.0 and Shockwave 3D. This tree navigation technique can be tested with a sitemap demo of the Chair for Multimedia Technology (requires Adobe Shockwave Player).
