---
name: Fisheye view
slug: fisheye-view
category: layout
status: published
created: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
modified: 2026-08-21T00:00:00.000Z
definition: A focus plus context display that magnifies whatever has attention
  and progressively compresses everything further away, like a lens dragged
  along a list.
aliases:
  - name: fisheye distortion
    source: community
tags:
  - canvas
  - perception
relations:
  contrastWith:
    - dock-magnification
    - focus-plus-context
  variantOf: []
  partOf: []
  seeAlso:
    - screen-magnification
implementations: []
sources:
  - title: A Review of Overview+Detail, Zooming, and Focus+Context Interfaces,
      Cockburn, Karlson and Bederson
    url: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1456650.1456652
demo: inline
exhibit: false
useWhen: magnifying one item without hiding the rest
---

A fisheye view is a lens laid over a list, a graph or a timeline. Whatever has attention is
drawn at full size, its immediate neighbours a little smaller, theirs smaller again, and by the
far end of the data the rows are slivers a pixel or two high. The name comes from the camera
lens, and the geometry is the same: one continuous distortion function, not two zoom levels
stitched together. Move the attention and the whole distortion travels with it, so the reader
never loses their place in the way a jump to a new screen loses it. The term entered interface
work through George Furnas in the mid nineteen eighties and is surveyed, with its cousins, in
Cockburn, Karlson and Bederson's review of focus plus context interfaces.

The relationship to the neighbours is worth stating exactly, because all three words get used
for each other. [Focus plus context](/focus-plus-context) is the family: one region in detail,
the rest kept on screen for orientation. A fisheye is the member of that family whose falloff
is gradual, which is what separates it from an accordion or an expanding row, where there are
only two sizes and everything that is not focused is equally small.
[Dock magnification](/dock-magnification) is a fisheye with about eight items in it: one
instance, small enough that the compression barely registers and only the bulge is noticed. And
[overview plus detail](/overview-plus-detail) is the alternative strategy rather than a variant,
since it keeps two separate views at two scales instead of deforming one.

What a fisheye buys is that nothing has to be thrown away. Thirty rows, or three hundred, all
stay in the layout, in order, with their position on screen still meaning something, so the
reader keeps a spatial memory of where things are and can steer the lens by that memory rather
than by search. It is at its best where the data is dense, the ordering is meaningful, and
neighbours matter: file trees, gantt bars, waveform editors, a code minimap with a magnified
band.

The cost is legibility, and it is not a small one. Away from the focus the content is present
but unreadable, so a fisheye is honest only when the compressed material still carries useful
signal in its shape (length, colour, density) rather than in its words. Two more traps follow
from the geometry. Targets keep changing size, so pointing becomes a moving problem and small
rows are genuinely hard to hit, which is why a fisheye needs a keyboard path and a generous
motion budget. And the distortion has to be contained: if the deformation pushes on the layout
around it, every step of the lens shoves the page, and the reader loses exactly the stability
the technique was chosen for.