Visual Planning: A Practical Approach to Automated Presentation Design

Abstract

Based on a set of design principles, automated visu?l ~resentation systems promise to simplify an applicatiOn programmer's design tasks by automatically constructing appropriate visual explanations for diff~r~nt information. However, these automated pre~entatwn systems must be equipped with a powerful mference approach to suit practical applications. Here, we present a planning-based, practical inference approach that can design a series of connected visual presentations in interactive environments. Our emphasis here is on a set of important visual planning features and how they facilitate visual design. This s.et of fea~ures includes a knowledge-rich representatiOn of vtsual planning variables and constraints, a novel object-decomposition model that can be used with. action decomposition to simplify the visual synthe~ts process, and practical temporal and spatial reasonmg capabilities to facilitate coherent visual design and presentation. In addition, we have implemented our visual planning approach in a visual planner called PREVISE, as part of our automated presentation ~estbed system. A set of examples is also given to tl~ustrate the necessity and utility of our visual planmng approach.