Chronoscope was an idea I had several years ago. Unfortunately, I have had little time to even think about it and am afraid, now, that I may not get to it. Basically, I envisioned a new way to visualize time-scaled data. Well, not completely a new way, as my concept uses time lines, which are an ancient and trusted mode of representation. In my vision, however, I saw dynamically inter-related time streams floating in a visual 3-space, with those time streams being interlinked. I also thought to abstract the concept higher to create a general tool for the visualization of arbitrarily-scaled data. VisiCalc established the spreadsheet metaphor, which became hugely successful as a way of visualizing certain kinds of numerical data. I am looking for a metaphor equally as powerful for dealing with time or scale oriented data. That's the basic idea.
posted by John Tobler at 6/21/2000 09:54:39 AM