Word clouds are a widely-used technique to visualize documents or collections of documents that are arranged in a space-efficient 2D layout. Their popularity is based on the intuitive understanding and interpretation. 3D computer graphics are available in hand-held devices, on desktop computers, and in the form of specialized hardware, such as Microsofts’ HoloLens (Augmented Reality) or the HTC VIVE (Virtual Reality). The wide availability of today’s affordable 3D capable devices poses the question, how a 2D word cloud layout can be transferred into 3D space. In this paper, we discuss a prototypical 3D Wordle-based word cloud layout named DeepClouds that generates 3D word cloud layouts by introducing the depth of the position of words as an additional variable in the layout generation algorithm. Hereby, the algorithm exploits the z-buffer to efficiently generate an overlap-free layout from the camera’s perspective. Besides introducing the DeepClouds technique, we discuss emerging problems as well as possible future areas of research and applications with respect to 3D word clouds.
@InProceedings{JENTNER18.5, author = {Wolfgang Jentner and Florian Stoffel}, title = {DeepClouds: Stereoscopic 3D Wordle based on Conical Spirals}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {may}, date = {7-12}, location = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Mennatallah El-Assady and Annette Hautli-Janisz and Verena Lyding}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {979-10-95546-13-9}, language = {english} }
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