Investigating interaction with visualisations that wrap around cylindrical or toroidal topologies
Tim Dwyer, Kun-Ting Chen, Kim Marriott, Benjamin Bach · OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2021
Traditional 2-dimensional (2D) data visualisations are designed to be viewed on a printed page or standard screen. However, it is possible to arrange data on a 3D surface such as a sphere or torus topology, and then project such a surface onto a 2D rectangular plane while wrapping the data around the boundaries of a 2D surface. Potential benefits include the preservation of the data’s underlying topology in the case of geospatial data, and the preservation of the data’s underlying structure in the case of abstract data such as networks. However, in wrapped visualisations the viewer needs to perceive continuity of the visualisation across boundaries, which may induce additional cognitive load. Despite widespread use of projection techniques in geovisualisation and study of network embeddings on surfaces by mathematicians, there is very little research into wrapped data visualisations. This research aims to (1) explore the design space for interactive wrapped data visualisations and determine the kinds of data visualisations that can potentially benefit from being laid out on a 2D cylindrical, spherical, or toroidal topology; (2) design a tool capable of creating wrapped visualisations for various types of data, which can be interactively panned; (3) conduct user studies to evaluate readability of wrapped visualisations and their equivalent unwrapped visualisations; (4) conduct user studies to evaluate whether interactive wrapped visualisations for real-world applications such as software applications could be practically usable by domain experts.