Wow, the Papers Fast Forward starts with a bang! Extremely well done "movie opening" for the best paper, certainly the most elaborate paper preview I have ever seen. Jeff Heer also did a great job with his minimalist list of quotations (and no talking). Caroline also did a great cliffhanger-style preview of our paper. Looks like it's going to be an interesting few days.

The Best Paper by Elmqvist, Dragicevic, and Fekete has an interesting take on using 3D transitions for navigating scatterplot matrices. The target audience is also people not too familiar with visualization, though I think this would still overwhelm them. The actual navigation between cells isn't improved, and Georges Grinstein made a valid remark about the cognitive load when switching between 2D and 3D. But it's good to see more animation for navigation, Robertson et al.'s paper later will also be interesting.

Criticism of the sad state of theory in InfoVis. Yes! Zhicheng Liu presented work he has done with Nancy Nersessian, John Stasko. His take on internal and external knowledge and the way they can be applied in InfoVis is a great basis for further work. He also quoted from our paper (yes, another link to our stuff, but what can I do?). Stasko and his students have been doing some excellent foundational work in the last years, it's great to see that.

John Peltier would be jumping up and down if he were here, seeing Geoffrey Draper present his work on visualizing exit poll data. He's using what is essentially a donut chart for the data. The interaction is not bad, but the visualization is really close to useless. You can't see different subsets at the same time, and the donut makes comparing between different categories difficult. There are much better ways to show this kind of data, like Parallel Sets. Their goal was for this to be useful for non-experts, which it undoubtedly was – but I wonder if a better visualization might get close in that regard and still be a better visualization.