For a visualization to be considered interactive, it must satisfy two criteria:
Human input: The control of some aspect of the visual representation of information must be available to humans
Response time: The changes made by humans must be incorporated into the visualization in a timely manner
When large amounts of data must be processed to create a visualization, this becomes very hard, sometimes impossible, even with the current technology; therefore, "interactive visualization" is usually applied to systems that provide feedback to the users within several seconds of input. Many interactive visualization systems support a metaphor of navigation, analogous to navigation through the physical world.
The benefit of interaction is that people can explore a larger information space in a shorter time, which can be understood through one platform. However, a disadvantage to this interaction is that it requires a lot of time to exhaustively check every possibility to...