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`Toolglass and Magic Lenses: The See-Through Interface
`Eric A. Bier, Maureen C. Stone, Ken Pier, William Buxton†, Tony D. DeRose‡
`Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304
`†University of Toronto, ‡University of Washington
`
`Abstract
`Toolglass(cid:212) widgets are new user interface tools that can appear,
`as though on a transparent sheet of glass, between an application
`and a traditional cursor. They can be positioned with one hand
`while the other positions the cursor. The widgets provide a rich
`and concise vocabulary for operating on application objects.
`These widgets may incorporate visual filters, called Magic Lens(cid:212)
`filters, that modify the presentation of application objects to
`reveal hidden information, to enhance data of interest, or to
`suppress distracting information. Together, these tools form a
`see-through interface that offers many advantages over traditional
`controls. They provide a new style of interaction that better
`exploits the user’s everyday skills. They can reduce steps, cursor
`motion, and errors. Many widgets can be provided in a user inter-
`face, by designers and by users, without requiring dedicated
`screen space. In addition, lenses provide rich context-dependent
`feedback and the ability to view details and context simultaneous-
`ly. Our widgets and lenses can be combined to form operation
`and viewing macros, and can be used over multiple applications.
`CR Categories and Subject Descriptors: I.3.6 [Computer
`Graphics]: Methodology and Techniques−interaction techniques;
`H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Inter-
`[Computer Graphics]:
`faces−interaction
`styles;
`I.3.3
`Picture/Image Generation−viewing algorithms; I.3.4 [Computer
`Graphics]: Graphics Utilities−graphics editors
`Key Words: multi-hand, button, lens, viewing filter, control
`panel, menu, transparent, macro
`1. Introduction
`We introduce a new style of graphical user interface, called the
`see-through interface. The see-through interface includes semi-
`transparent interactive tools, called Toolglass(cid:212) widgets, that are
`used in an application work area. They appear on a virtual sheet
`of transparent glass, called a Toolglass sheet, between the applica-
`tion and a traditional cursor. These widgets may provide a
`customized view of the application underneath them, using
`viewing filters called Magic Lens(cid:212)
` filters. Each lens is a screen
`region together with an operator, such as ‘‘magnification’’ or
`‘‘render in wireframe,’’ performed on objects viewed in the
`region. The user positions a Toolglass sheet over desired objects
`and then points through the widgets and lenses. These tools
`create spatial modes that can replace temporal modes in user in-
`terface systems.
`Two hands can be used to operate the see-through interface. The
`user can position the sheet with the non-dominant hand, using a
`device such as a trackball or touchpad, at the same time as the
`dominant hand positions a cursor (e.g., with a mouse or stylus).
`Thus, the user can line up a widget, a cursor, and an application
`object in a single two-handed gesture.
`
`Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted
`Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted
`provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct
`provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct
`commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the
`commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the
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`otherwise, or to republish, requires a fee and/or specific permission.
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`©1993 ACM-0-89791-601-8/93/008…$1.50
`©1993 ACM-0-89791-601-8/93/008/0015…$1.50
`
`A set of simple widgets called click-through buttons is shown in
`figure 1. These buttons can be used to change the color of objects
`below them. The user positions the widget in the vicinity and
`indicates precisely which object to color by clicking through the
`button with the cursor over that object, as shown in figure 1(b).
`The buttons in figure 1(c) change the outline colors of objects. In
`addition, these buttons include a filter that shows only outlines,
`suppressing filled areas. This filter both reminds the user that
`these buttons do not affect filled areas and allows the user to
`change the color of outlines that were obscured.
`
`(a)
`
`(b)
`
`(c)
`
`Figure 1. Click-through buttons. (a) Six wedge objects.
`(b) Clicking through a green fill-color button. (c) Clicking
`through a cyan outline-color button.
`Many widgets can be placed on a single sheet, as shown in figure
`2. The user can switch from one command or viewing mode to
`another simply by repositioning the sheet.
`
`Figure 2. A sheet of widgets. Clockwise from upper left:
`color palette, shape palette, clipboard, grid, delete button,
`and buttons that navigate to additional widgets.
`Widgets and lenses can be composed by overlapping them,
`allowing a large number of specialized tools to be created from a
`small basic set. Figure 3 shows an outline color palette over a
`magnifying lens, which makes it easy to point to individual edges.
`
`Figure 3. An outline color palette over a magnifying lens.
`The see-through interface has been implemented in the Multi-De-
`vice Multi-User Multi-Editor (MMM) framework5 in the Cedar
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`programming language and environment,24 running on the SunOS
`UNIX(cid:212)›compatible operating system on Sun Microsystems
`SPARCstations and other computers. The Gargoyle graphics
`editor,20 as integrated into MMM, serves as a complex application
`on which to test our interface. We use a standard mouse for the
`dominant hand and a MicroSpeed FastTRAP(cid:212) trackball for the
`non-dominant hand. The trackball includes three buttons and a
`thumbwheel, which can be used to supply additional parameters
`to the interface.
`The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. The next
`section describes related work. Section 3 describes some
`examples of the tools we have developed. Section 4 discusses
`general techniques for using the see-through interface. Section 5
`discusses some advantages of this approach. Section 6 describes
`our implementation. Sections 7 and 8 present our conclusions and
`plans for future work.
`Except for figures 12 and 16, all of the figures in this paper reflect
`current capabilities of our software.
`2. Related Work
`The components of the see-through interface combine work in
`four areas: simultaneous use of two hands, movable tools,
`transparent tools, and viewing filters. In this section, we describe
`related work in these four areas.
`Multi-Handed Interfaces
`Several authors have studied interfaces that interpret continuous
`gestures of both hands. In Krueger’s VIDEOPLACEs system,15 the
`position and motion of both of a participant’s hands, as seen by a
`video camera, determine the behavior of a variety of on-screen
`objects, including animated creatures and B-spline curves.
`Buxton and Myers discovered that users naturally overlap the use
`of both hands, when this is possible, and that, even when the two
`hands are used sequentially, there is still a performance advantage
`over single-hand use.7,8
`Other work characterizes the situations under which people
`successfully perform two-handed tasks. Guiard presents evidence
`that people are well-adapted to tasks where the non-dominant
`hand coarsely positions a context and the dominant hand performs
`detailed work in that context.4 Similarly, Kabbash presents
`evidence that a user’s non-dominant hand performs as well or
`better than the dominant hand on coarse positioning tasks.13
`Our system takes full advantage of a user’s two-handed skills; the
`non-dominant hand sets up a context by coarsely positioning the
`sheet, and the dominant hand acts in that context, pointing
`precisely at objects through the sheet.
`Movable Tools
`Menus that pop up at the cursor position are movable tools in the
`work area. However, such a menu’s position is determined by the
`cursor position before it appears, making it difficult to position it
`relative to application objects.
`Several existing systems provide menus that can be positioned in
`the same work area as application objects. For example,
`MacDraw ‘‘tear-off menus’’ allow a pull-down menu to be
`positioned in the work area and repositioned by clicking and
`dragging its header.17 Unfortunately, moving these menus takes
`the cursor hand away from its task, and they must be moved
`whenever the user needs to see or manipulate objects under them.
`Toolglass sheets can be positioned relative to application objects
`and moved without tying up the cursor.
`Transparent Tools
`Some existing systems that allow menus to be positioned over the
`
`work area make these menus transparent. For example, the Alto
`Markup system18 displays a menu of modes when a mouse button
`goes down. Each menu item is drawn as an icon, with the space
`between icons transparent. Bartlett’s transparent controls for
`interactive graphics use stipple patterns to get the effect of
`transparency in X Windows.2
`While these systems allow the user to continue to see the
`underlying application while a menu is in place, they don’t allow
`the user to interact with the application through the menu and they
`don’t use filters to modify the view of the application, as does our
`interface.
`
`Viewing Filters
`
`Many existing window systems provide a pixel magnifier. Our
`Magic Lens filters generalize the lens metaphor to many
`representations other than pixels and to many operations other
`than magnification. Because they can access application-specific
`data structures, our lenses are able to perform qualitatively differ-
`ent viewing operations, including showing hidden information
`and showing information in a completely different format. Even
`when the operation is magnification, our lenses can produce
`results of superior quality, since they are not limited to processing
`data at screen resolution.
`
`The concept of using a filter to change the way information is
`visualized in a complex system has been introduced before.25,10,14
`Recent
`image processing systems support compostition of
`overlapping filters.23 However, none of these systems combine
`the filtered views with the metaphor of a movable viewing lens.
`
`Other systems provide special-purpose lenses that provide more
`detailed views of state in complex diagrams. For example, a
`fisheye
`lens can enhance
`the presentation of complicated
`graphs.21 The bifocal display22 provides similar functionallity for
`viewing a large space of documents. The MasPar Profiler3 uses a
`tool based on the magnifying lens metaphor to generate more
`detail (including numerical data) from a graphical display of a
`program.
`
`Magic Lens filters combine viewing filters with interaction and
`composition in a much broader way than do previous systems.
`They are useful both as a component of the see-through interface
`and as a general-purpose visualization paradigm, in which the
`lenses become an integral part of the model being viewed.
`
`3. Examples
`
`This section shows several tools that demonstrate features of the
`see-through interface. Because we have implemented primarily in
`the graphical editing domain, most of these tools are tailored to
`that application. However, the see-through interface can be used
`in a wide variety of other application domains.
`
`Shape and Property Palettes
`
`Palettes are collections of objects or properties that can be added
`to a scene. Figure 1 showed two widgets that apply color to
`shapes. Similar tools can be designed to apply other graphical
`properties, such as type and line styles to an illustration, shading
`parameters to a 3D model, or initial values to a simulation. Figure
`4 illustrates a widget containing graphical shapes that can be
`‘‘pushed through’’ from the tool into the illustration below. In
`figure 4(a), the user has positioned a shape palette widget (shown
`in cyan) over an illustration (shown in magenta). When the user
`clicks on a shape on the tool, a copy of that shape is added to the
`illustration. The widget attaches the copied shape to the cursor
`for interactive dragging until the final shape position is achieved
`(figure 4(b)).
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`Figure 4. Shape palette. (a) Choosing a shape. (b) Placing
`the shape.
`Figure 5 shows a design for a property palette for setting the face
`of text in a document. Each face (regular, bold, etc.) has an active
`region on the right side of the tool. Selecting the text displayed in
`this region changes its face.
`
`regular
`italic
`bold
`bold italic
`
`temporal modes and modes created
`by holding down a keyboard key with
`Because these spatial
`spatial modes.
`modes can be changed directly in the
`application work area, the cursor and
`the user’s attention can remain on the
`
`Figure 5. Font face palette. The word ‘‘directly’’ is being
`selected and changed to bold face.
`Clipboards
`Clipboard widgets pick up shapes and properties from underlying
`objects, acting as visible instantiations of the copy and paste keys
`common in many applications. Clipboards can pick up entire
`objects or specific properties such as color, dash pattern or font.
`They can hold single or multiple copies of an object. The objects
`or properties captured on the clipboard can be copied from the
`clipboard by clicking on them, as in the palette tools.
`Figure 6 shows a symmetry clipboard that picks up the shape that
`the user clicks on (figure 6(a)) and produces all of the rotations of
`that shape by multiples of 90 degrees (figure 6(b)). Moving the
`clipboard and clicking on it again, the user drops a translated copy
`of the resulting symmetrical shape (figure 6(c)). Clicking the
`small square in the upper left corner of the widget clears the
`widget so that new shapes can be clipped.
`
`(a)
`
`(b)
`
`(c)
`
`Figure 6. Symmetry clipboard. (a) Picking up an object.
`(b) Rotated copies appear. (c) The copies are moved and
`pasted.
`Figure 7 shows an example of a type of clipboard that we call a
`rubbing. It picks up the fill color of an object when the user
`clicks on that object through the widget (figure 7(a)). The widget
`also picks up the shape of the object as a reminder of where the
`color came from (figure 7(b)). Many fill-color rubbings can be
`placed on a single sheet, allowing the user to store several colors
`and remember where they came from. The stored color is applied
`to new shapes when the user clicks on the applicator nib of the
`rubbing (figure 7(c)).
`
`Besides implementing graphical cut and paste, clipboards provide
`a general mechanism for building customized libraries of shapes
`and properties.
`
`Previewing Lenses
`In graphical editing, a lens can be used to modify the visual
`properties of any graphical object, to provide a preview of what
`changing the property would look like. Properties include color,
`line thickness, dash patterns, typeface, arrowheads and drop
`shadows. A previewing lens can also be used to see what an
`illustration would look like under different circumstances; for
`example, showing a color illustration as it would be rendered on a
`black/white display or on a particular printer. Figure 8 shows a
`Celtic knotwork viewed through two lenses, one that adds drop
`shadows and one that shows the picture in black and white. The
`achromatic lens reveals that the drop shadows may be difficult to
`distinguish from the figure on a black/white display.
`
`Figure 8. An achromatic lens over a drop shadow lens
`over a knotwork. (Knotwork by Andrew Glassner)
`Previewing lenses can be parameterized. For example, the drop
`shadow lens has parameters to control the color and displacement
`of the shadow. These parameters can be included as graphical
`controls on the sheet near the lens, attached to input devices such
`as the thumbwheel, or set using other widgets.
`
`Selection Tools
`Selection is difficult in graphical editing when objects overlap or
`share a common edge. Our selection widgets address this
`problem by modifying the view and the interpretation of input
`actions. For example, figure 9 shows a widget that makes it easy
`to select a shape vertex even when it is obscured by other shapes.
`This tool contains a wire-frame lens that reveals all vertices by
`making shape interiors transparent. Mouse events are modified to
`snap to the nearest vertex.
`
`Select
`
`Select
`
`Vertex
`
`Vertex
`
`(a)
`
`(b)
`
`(c)
`
`Figure 9. Vertex selection widget. (a) Shapes. (b) The
`widget is placed. (c) A selected vertex.
`
`(a)
`
`(b)
`
`(c)
`
`Figure 7. Fill-color rubbings. (a) Lifting a color. (b) Moving
`the clipboard. (c) Applying the color.
`
`Figure 10. The local scaling lens. (Tiling by Doug Wyatt)
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`Figure 10 shows a lens that shrinks each object around its own
`centroid. This lens makes it easy to select an edge that is
`coincident with one or more other edges.
`
`Grids
`Figure 11 shows three widgets, each of which displays a different
`kind of grid. The leftmost two grids are rectangular with different
`spacings. The rightmost grid is hexagonal. Although each grid
`only appears when the lens is in place, the coordinates of the grid
`are bound to the scene, so that grid points do not move when the
`sheet moves. By clicking on the grid points and moving the
`widget, the user can draw precise shapes larger than the widget.
`If the sheet is moved by the non-dominant hand, the user can
`quickly switch between the grids during an editing motion.
`
`Figure 11. Three grid tools.
`
`Visualization
`Figure 12 illustrates the use of tools and lenses to measure
`Gaussian curvature in the context of a shaded rendering of a 3D
`model. The pseudo-color view indicates the sign and relative
`magnitude of the curvature,9 and the evaluation tool displays the
`value at the point indicated.
`
`2.5
`
`Figure 12. Gaussian curvature pseudo-color lens with
`overlaid tool to read the numeric value of the curvature.
`(Original images courtesy of Steve Mann)
`
`4. Using the See-Through Interface
`Widgets and lenses are most effective when supported by
`appropriate conventions specifying how
`to position, size,
`organize, and customize them. This section discusses a few of
`these issues.
`
`Moving and Sizing the Sheet or the Application
`A Toolglass sheet can be moved by clicking and dragging on its
`border with a mouse or by rolling the trackball. The sheet and all
`its widgets can stretch and shrink as a unit when the user works a
`a second controller such as a thumbwheel. With these moving
`and sizing controls, the user can center a widget on any applica-
`tion object and size the widget to cover any screen region. Large
`widgets can be used to minimize sheet motion when applying a
`widget to several objects. A widget that has been stretched to
`cover the entire work area effectively creates a command mode
`over the entire application.
`By clicking a button on the trackball, the user can disconnect the
`trackball from the sheet and enable its use for scrolling and
`zooming a selected application area. If a sheet is over this appli-
`cation, the user can now move an application object to a widget
`instead of moving a widget to an object. This is a convenient way
`to use the see-through interface on illustrations that are too large
`to fit on the screen.
`
`Managing Sheets
`A typical application will have a large number of widgets in its in-
`terface. To avoid clutter, we need a way to organize these
`widgets and sheets. One approach is to put all of the widgets on a
`single sheet that can be navigated by scrolling and zooming.
`Perlin and Fox’s paper in these proceedings19 describes tech-
`niques for creating and navigating unlimited structures on a single
`sheet. A second approach is to have a master sheet that generates
`other sheets. Each of these sheets could generate more sheets,
`like hierarchical menus. A third technique, used in our prototype,
`is to allow a single sheet to show different sets of widgets at dif-
`ferent times. The set to display can be selected in several ways:
`the user can click a special widget in the set, like the arrows in
`HyperCard,(cid:212)
`11 that jumps to another set. In addition, a master
`view provides a table of contents of the available sets allowing the
`user to jump to any one. To use different sets simultaneously, the
`user creates additional sheets.
`Customizing Sheets
`Because sheets can contain an unlimited number of widgets, they
`provide a valuable new substrate on which users can create their
`own customized widgets and widget sets. In effect, the sheets can
`provide a user interface editor, allowing users to move and copy
`existing widgets, compose macros by overlapping widgets, and
`snap widgets together in new configurations. Indeed, with the
`techniques described in this paper, one Toolglass sheet could even
`be used to edit another.
`5. Advantages of See-Through Tools
`In this section, we describe some advantages we see for using the
`see-through interface. Most of these advantages result from
`placing tools on overlapping layers and from the graphical nature
`of the interface.
`In most applications, a control panel competes for screen space
`with the work area of the application. Toolglass sheets exist on a
`layer above the work area. With proper management of the
`sheets, they can provide an unlimited space for tools. The widgets
`in use can take up the entire work area. Then, they can be
`scrolled entirely off the screen to provide an unobstructed view of
`the application or space for a different set of widgets.
`The see-through user interface can be used on tiny displays, such
`as notebook computers or personal digital assistants, that have
`little screen real estate for fixed-position control panels. It can
`also be used on wall-sized displays, where a fixed control panel
`might be physically out of reach from some screen positions.
`These tools can move with the user to stay close at hand.
`A user interface layer over the desktop provides a natural place to
`locate application-independent tools, such as a clipboard that can
`copy material from one window to another.
`These widgets can combine multiple task steps into a single step.
`For example, the vertex selection widget of figure 9 allows the
`user to turn on a viewing mode (wire-frame), turn on a command
`mode (selection), and point to an object in a single two-handed
`gesture.
`Most user interfaces have temporal modes that can cause the same
`action to have different effects at different times. With our inter-
`face, modes are defined spatially by placing a widget and the
`cursor over the object to be operated on. Thus, the user can easily
`see what the current mode is (e.g., by the label on the widget) and
`how to get out of it (e.g., move the cursor out of the widget). In
`addition, each widget can provide customized feedback for its op-
`eration. For example, a widget that edits text in an illustration can
`include a lens that filters out all the objects except text. When
`several widgets are visible at once, the feedback in each one
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`serves a dual role. It helps the user make proper use of the widget
`and it helps the user choose the correct widget.
`The visual nature of the see-through interface also allows users to
`construct personalized collections of widgets as described above.
`
`6. Implementation
`This section provides an overview of our implementation of the
`see-through interface.
`
`Toolglass Sheets
`We describe three Toolglass subsystems: one that handles simul-
`taneous input from two pointing devices and updates the screen
`after multiple simultaneous changes, one that modifies pointing
`events as they pass through widgets, and one that modifies graph-
`ical output as it passes up through each widget.
`
`Multi-Device Input and Screen Refresh
`Our Toolglass software uses the MMM framework.5 The see-
`through interface relies on the following features of MMM.
`MMM takes events from multiple input devices, such as the
`mouse and trackball, keeps track of which device produced which
`event, and places all events on a single queue. It dequeues each
`event in order and determines to which application that event
`should be delivered. MMM applications are arranged in a
`hierarchy that indicates how they are nested on the screen. Each
`event is passed to the root application, which may pass the event
`on to one of its child applications, which may in turn pass the
`event on down the tree. Mouse events are generally delivered to
`the most deeply nested application whose screen region contains
`the mouse coordinates. However, when the user is dragging or
`rubberbanding an object in a particular application, all mouse co-
`ordinates go
`to
`that application until
`the dragging or
`rubberbanding is completed. Keyboard events go to the currently
`selected application.
`To support Toolglass sheets, MMM’s rules for handling trackball
`input were modified. When a sheet is movable, trackball and
`thumbwheel events go to the top-level application, which
`interprets them as commands to move or resize the sheet,
`respectively. When the sheet is not movable, the trackball and
`thumbwheel events are delivered to the selected application,
`which interprets them as commands to scroll or zoom that appli-
`cation.
`
`Filtering Input Through Lenses and Widgets
`
`llo
`He
`World
`
`(a)
`
`Root Application
`
`Text Editor
`
`Toolglass
`Sheet
`Graphical Editor
`(b)
`
`Figure 13. A simple hierarchy of applications
`Ordinarily, MMM input events move strictly from the root appli-
`cation towards the leaf applications. However, to support the see-
`through interface, input events must be passed back up this tree.
`For example, figure 13(b) shows an application hierarchy. The
`left-to-right order at the lower level of this tree indicates the top-
`to-bottom order of applications on the screen. Input events are
`first delivered to the Toolglass sheet to determine if the user is
`interacting with a widget or lens. If so, the event is modified by
`the sheet. In any case, the event is returned to the root applica-
`tion, which either accepts the event itself or passes it on to the
`child applications that appear farther to the right in the tree.
`
`The data structure that represents an MMM event is modified in
`three ways to support Toolglass sheets. First, an event is
`annotated with a representation of the parts of the application tree
`it has already visited. In figure 13, this prevents the root applica-
`tion from delivering the event to the sheet more than once.
`Second, an event is tagged with a command string to be
`interpreted when it reaches its final application. For example, a
`color palette click-through button annotates each mouse-click
`event with the command name ‘‘FillColor’’ followed by a color.
`Finally, if the widget contains a lens, the mouse coordinates of an
`event may be modified so the event will be correctly directed to
`the object that appears under the cursor through that lens.
`
`(a)
`
`(b)
`
`(c)
`
`Figure 14. Composing color-changing widgets.
`Widgets can be composed by overlapping them. When a stack of
`overlapped widgets receives input (e.g., a mouse click), the input
`event is passed top-to-bottom through the widgets. Each widget
`in turn modifies the command string that has been assembled so
`far. For example, a widget might concatenate an additional com-
`mand onto the current command string. In figure 14, a widget
`that changes fill colors (figure 14(a)) is composed with a widget
`that changes line colors (figure 14(b)) to form a widget that
`changes both fill and line colors (figure 14(c)). If the line color
`widget is on top, then the command string would be ‘‘LineColor
`blue’’ after passing through this widget, and ‘‘LineColor blue;
`FillColor cyan’’ after both widgets.
`
`Filtering Output Through Lenses and Widgets
`Ordinarily, MMM output is composed from the leaf applications
`up. To support lenses, the normal screen refresh composition has
`been extended to allow information to flow down and across the
`tree as well as up. For example, if the widgets in figure 13
`contain one or more lenses, and if any of those lenses is situated
`over the graphical editor, each lens must examine the contents of
`the graphical editor (which is the lens’s sibling in the hierarchy) in
`order to draw itself.
`In addition, to improve performance, MMM applications compute
`the rectangular bounding box of the regions that have recently
`changed, and propagate this box to the root application, which
`determines which screen pixels will need to be updated.
`Generally, this bounding box is passed up the tree, transformed
`along the way by the coordinate transformation between each ap-
`plication and the next one up the tree. However, lenses can
`modify the set of pixels that an operation affects. A magnifying
`lens, for example, generally increases the number of pixels
`affected. As a result, the bounding box must be passed to all
`lenses that affect it to determine the final bounding box.
`Magic Lens Filters
`A Magic Lens filter modifies the image displayed on a region of
`the screen, called the viewing region, by applying a viewing filter
`to objects in a model. The input region for the lens is defined by
`the viewing region and the viewing filter. It may be the same size
`as the viewing region, or different, as in the magnification lens.
`For a 3D model, the input region is a cone-shaped volume defined
`by the eye point and the viewing region. Input regions can be
`used to cull away all model objects except those needed to
`produce the lens image. Our current implementations do not
`perform this culling; as described below, there are advantages to
`lenses that operate on the entire model.
`When several lenses are composed, the effect is as though the
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`77
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`Ex. GOOG 1115
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`model were passed sequentially through the stack of lenses from
`bottom to top, with each lens operating on the model in turn. In
`addition, when one lens has other lenses below it, it may modify
`how the boundaries of these other lenses are mapped onto the
`screen within its own boundary. The input region of a group of
`lenses taken as a whole can be computed by applying the inverses
`of the viewing filters to the lens boundaries themselves.
`Our lenses depend on the implementation of Toolglass sheets to
`manage the size, shape and motion of their viewing regions. This
`section describes two strategies we have tried for implementing
`viewing filters: a procedural method that we call recursive
`ambush, and a declarative method that we call model-in model-
`out. We also describe a third method that promises to be
`convenient when applicable, called reparameterize-and-clip.
`Finally, we discuss issues that arise in the presence of multiple
`model types.
`
`Recursive Ambush
`
`In the recursive ambush method, the original model is described
`procedurally as a set of calls in a graphics language such as
`Interpress(cid:212)
`12 or PostScript.®1 The lens is a new interpreter for
`the graphics language, with a different implementation for each
`graphics primitive. In most cases, the implementation of a given
`graphics primitive first performs some actions that carry out the
`modifying effect of the lens and then calls the previous
`implementation of the primitive. For example, a lens that
`modifies a picture such that all of its lines are drawn in red would
`modify the ‘‘DrawLine’’ primitive to set the color to red and then
`call the original ‘‘DrawLine’’ primitive.
`When lenses are composed, the previous implementation may not
`be the original graphics language primitive, but another lens
`primitive
`that performs yet another modification, making
`composition recursive.
`Recursive ambush lenses appear to have important advantages.
`Because they work at the graphics language level, they work
`across many applications. Because they work procedurally, they
`need not allocate storage. However, the other methods can also
`work at the graphics language level. In addition, recursive
`ambush lenses have three major disadvantages. First, making a
`new lens usually requires modifying many graphics language
`primitives. Second, debugging several composed lenses is
`difficult because the effects of several cooperating interpreters are
`hard to understand. Finally, performance deteriorates rapidly as
`lenses are composed because the result of each lens is computed
`many times; the number of computations doubles with the
`addition of each lens that overlaps all of the others.
`
`Model-In Model-Out
`
`In the model-in model-out (MIMO) method, we make a copy of
`the original model as the first step. This model might be the data
`structure of an edi