Keep both axes fixed while playing an animation

[sophiamersmann]

Description

• When playing an animation, only the current snapshot is taken into account
• As a result, the x-axis and y-axis change during the animation (see video below)
• This makes it difficult to understand the evolution/history of an indicator

Expected behaviour

Keep the x- and y-axis fixed while the animation is playing.

Steps to reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Go to any chart, e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart&time=earliest..2021
2. Click on the play button
3. Note that both axis ranges change while the animation is playing

Screenshots

Screen.Recording.2023-10-05.at.09.27.23.mov

This:

Screen.Recording.2023-08-28.at.15.37.03.mov

Not this

Screen.Recording.2023-08-28.at.15.37.32.mov

[sophiamersmann]

Hey @ikesau, I'm inclined to bump the priority of this issue up. It's brought to our attention regularly and it's something we really want to do since the timeline animation as it is today often does not show the evolution of a variable very clearly.

[danyx23]

@sophiamersmann @marcelgerber could we enumerate the cases where just calculating the X and Y domain from the input table would not work and try to carve those out especially? I think the scatter plot animation change is quite nice but it depends on having a solution for fixing both axis while we play.

If you think this isn't a relatively easy thing to do then it's not worth it, just trying to see if we can get to a place that is clearly better than what we have today without too much effort.

[sophiamersmann]

I think the easiest thing to do might be to implement it (should be quick to do if we're using the input table), put it on staging, and we all look at some examples?

[marcelgerber]

I think the easiest thing to do might be to implement it (should be quick to do if we're using the input table), put it on staging, and we all look at some examples?

Agreed!

[github-actions]

This issue has had no activity within 10 months. It is considered stale and will be closed in 7 days unless it is worked on or tagged as pinned.