One of the best collection of pointers for this stuff is the 'Non-Linear
Magnification Homepage' at

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~tkeahey/research/nlm/nlm.html

It coveres a lot of useful stuff about many different aspects (including
fisheye techniques). Incidentally, it's hard to believe that hyperbolic
trees are patented per se - the math has been there before and even the
projections (AFAIK). And there are plenty of approaches that have similar
properties (just check out the refs from above) so that it should be easy to
come up with a sufficiently distinctive technique that's not covered by
patents.

  - Andreas

PS. Here's one idea - how about using Quaternion space?! Has a couple of
cute properties... (there are probably more reasonable approaches but why
bother?! ;-)


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Henrik Gedenryd [mailto:Henrik.Gedenryd at lucs.lu.se]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 28, 2000 10:44 PM
> To: squeak at cs.uiuc.edu
> Cc: recipient list not shown
> Subject: Re: zoomable morph?
> 
> 
> Torsten.Bergmann at phaidros.com wrote:
> 
> > An interesting representation for trees is Hyperbolic Tree
> > http://www3.inxight.com/htdbdemo/htdocs/index.html
> > 
> > It's patented :(
> > 
> > Torsten
> > 
> 
> There are also Fisheye views, original reference in 
> Proceedings of CHI 86-87
> something (George Furnas wrote it I believe). This technique 
> is quite useful
> in practice as well. References to this technique can 
> probably be found in
> various places on the net.
> 
> Henrik
> 
>