Mass and social media provide flows of images for real world events. It is
sometimes difficult to represent realities and impressions of events using
only text. However, even a single photo might remind us complex events. Along
with events in the real world, there are representative images, such as
design of products and commercial pictures. We can therefore recognize
changes in trends of people's ideas, experiences, and interests through
observing the flows of such representative images. This paper presents a
novel 3D visualization system to explore temporal changes in trends using
images associating with different topics, called Image Bricks. We show case
studies using images extracted from our six-year blog archive. We first
extract clusters of images as topics related to given keywords. We then
visualize them on multiple timelines in a 3D space. Users can visually read
stories of topics through exploring visualized images.