Drawing Graphs on the Sphere
Scott Michael Perry, Mason Sun Yin, Kathryn Gray, Stephen Kobourov · 2020
Graphs are most often visualized in the two dimensional Euclidean plane, but spherical space offers several advantages when visualizing graphs. First, some graphs such as skeletons of three dimensional polytopes (tetrahedron, cube, icosahedron) have spherical realizations that capture their 3D structure, which cannot be visualized as well in the Euclidean plane. Second, the sphere makes possible a natural "focus + context visualization with more detail in the center of the view and less details away from the center. Finally, whereas layouts in the Euclidean plane implicitly define notions of "central and "peripheral nodes, this issue is reduced on the sphere, where the layout can be centered at any node of interest.