Beamtrees are a new method for the visualization of large hierarchical data sets, such as directory structures and organization structures. Nodes are shown as stacked circular beams such that both the hierarchical structure as well as the size of nodes are depicted. The dimensions of beams are calculated using a variation of the treemap algorithm. Both a two-dimensional and a three-dimensional variant are presented. A small user study indicated that beamtrees are significantly more effective than nested treemaps and cushion treemaps for the extraction of global hierarchical information.
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