It's a Wrap: Toroidal Wrapping of Network Visualisations Supports Cluster Understanding Tasks

Abstract

We explore network visualisation on a two-dimensional torus topology that continuously wraps when the viewport is panned. That is, links may be “wrapped” across the boundary, allowing additional spreading of node positions to reduce visual clutter. Recent work has investigated such pannable wrapped visualisations, finding them not worse than unwrapped drawings for small networks for path-following tasks. However, they did not evaluate larger networks nor did they consider whether torus-based layout might also better display high-level network structure like clusters. We offer two algorithms for improving toroidal layout that is completely autonomous and automatic panning of the viewport to minimiswe wrapping links. The resulting layouts afford fewer crossings, less stress, and greater cluster separation. In a study of 32 participants comparing performance in cluster understanding tasks, we find that toroidal visualisation offers significant benefits over standard unwrapped visualisation in terms of improvement in error by 62.7% and time by 32.3%.

Authors
Kun-Ting Chen
Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Tim Dwyer
Monash University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Benjamin Bach
Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
Kim Marriott
Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
DOI

10.1145/3411764.3445439

Paper URL

https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445439

Video

Conference: CHI 2021

The ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (https://chi2021.acm.org/)

Session: Novel Visualization Techniques

[A] Paper Room 09, 2021-05-11 17:00:00~2021-05-11 19:00:00 / [B] Paper Room 09, 2021-05-12 01:00:00~2021-05-12 03:00:00 / [C] Paper Room 09, 2021-05-12 09:00:00~2021-05-12 11:00:00
Paper Room 09
15 items in this session
2021-05-11 08:00:00
2021-05-11 10:00:00
Japanese summary
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