Understanding the Voronoi Diagram

We are going to spend some time improving the tooltip we developed in the past few lectures. Right now it is annoying to hover over a dot. We have to place our mouse directly over the very small dots, and some dots overlap with one another. We have to be very precise with where we point our mouse. Some of our readers may have difficulty viewing information about a dot.

One solution would be to make the dots bigger. However, that will not solve the overlap issue. Another solution is to make the dimensions of the chart larger. This will not work either. Our readers may view this chart on a mobile device. If that is the case, we will have limited room. To fix this, we can use what is called a Voronoi diagram.

What is a Voronoi diagram?

It is a diagram that can tell you the shortest distance to reach a specific point. Voronoi diagrams can look intimidating, but they are straightforward to understand. We are going to be using this diagram to help us fix our issue. Let’s look at an example of the kinds of problems a Voronoi diagram can solve.