[sugar] The limits of Mesh View
Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
ypod at mit.edu
Sat Apr 19 01:07:04 EDT 2008
Eben Eliason wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 11:51 PM, Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos
> <ypod at mit.edu> wrote:
>
>> What are the practical limits at the moment?
>> How many icons can we fit at a maximum?
>>
>
> I'll give a somewhat vague response (mainly because even I'm not sure)
> to kick things off. To begin with, the answer depends in large part
> to the topography of the collaboration space. The view is much more
> scalable when the grouping factor of XOs is high, such that some
> activities cluster a number of them into a ring. This organizing
> factor makes things scalable, and was a key element of our design
> phase. If it turns out that most collaborations involve only 2 or 3
> XOs, and very few involve 5 or more, we won't hit the type of layout
> we envisioned early on. That said, I think the rough limits are going
> to lie between 50 and 100 (I said I'd be vague!) icons in the view at
> any one time before it becomes to difficult to manage. In our initial
> sketches, which allowed up to 25 or so ("class size") XOs to be in a
> given activity, we could handle 150 or more while retaining some
> visual clarity.
>
> Of course, we're working on ideas for improving scalability in
> general, such that the entire neighborhood is "accessible" via the
> search capability even when only a (potentially small!) subset of that
> neighborhood gets shown in the view by default. Additionally, we
> intend to add list views to all of the zoom levels, which will provide
> a sortable, searchable, filterable list of all activities, people, and
> devices present for the more extreme cases.
>
> - Eben
>
1) I don't understand how larger collaboration groups would increase
scalability. I would think it's the other way around: larger circles ->
larger radius of unoccupied space -> less icons
2) I also did a vague estimation of one exterme: the number of XO icons
that can be packed in screen. I think it's about 13x26 icons (of course
it's possible to do that by dividing the screen resolution with the svg
size, but was too lazy for that ;-). A full screen of icons would not be
legible either, but was I just trying to explore the limits.
Pol
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