Counterpoint: Orchestrating Large-Scale Custom Animated Visualizations

TL;DR

Counterpoint is a JavaScript framework that simplifies the development of large-scale, animated visualizations by managing state efficiently and supporting scalable rendering, demonstrated through flexible examples and minimal performance overhead.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for state management in large, animated visualizations, enabling easier development and integration with scalable rendering APIs.

Findings

Minimal performance overhead compared to existing techniques

Flexible visualization creation with compatibility to other toolkits

Supports accessibility considerations in visualizations

Abstract

Custom animated visualizations of large, complex datasets are helpful across many domains, but they are hard to develop. Much of the difficulty arises from maintaining visualization state across many animated graphical elements that may change in number over time. We contribute Counterpoint, a framework for state management designed to help implement such visualizations in JavaScript. Using Counterpoint, developers can manipulate large collections of marks with reactive attributes that are easy to render in scalable APIs such as Canvas and WebGL. Counterpoint also helps orchestrate the entry and exit of graphical elements using the concept of a rendering "stage." Through a performance evaluation, we show that Counterpoint adds minimal overhead over current high-performance rendering techniques while simplifying implementation. We provide two examples of visualizations created using Counterpoint that illustrate its flexibility and compatibility with other visualization toolkits as well as considerations for users with disabilities. Counterpoint is open-source and available at https://github.com/cmudig/counterpoint.