This paper concerns the benefits of presenting abstract data in 3D. Two experiments show that motion cues combined with stereo viewing can substantially increase the size of the graph that can be perceived. The first experiment was designed to provide quantitative measurements of how much more (or less) can be understood in 3D than in 2D. The 3D display used was configured so that the image on the monitor was coupled to the user's actual eye positions (and it was updated in real-time as the user moved) as well as being in stereo. Thus the effect was like a local "virtual reality" display located in the vicinity of the computer monitor. The results from this study show that head-coupled stereo viewing can increase the size of an abstract graph that can be understood by a factor of three; using stereo alone provided an increase by a factor of 1.6 and head coupling alone produced an increase by a factor of 2.2. The second experiment examined a variety of motion cues provided by head coupled perspective (as in virtual reality displays), hand guided motion and automatic rotation respectively, both with and without stereo in each case,. The results show that structured 3D motion and stereo viewing both help in understanding, but that the kind of motion is not particularly important; all improve performance, and all are more significant than stereo cues. These results provide strong reasons for using advanced 3D graphics for interacting with a large variety of information structures.

An experiment is reported which tests whether network information is more effectively displayed in a three dimensional space than in a two dimensional space. The experimental task is to trace a path in a network and the experiment is carried out in 2 0 , in a 3 0 stereo view, in a 3 0 view with head coupled perspective, and in a 3 0 stereo view with head coupled perspective: this last condition creates a localized virtual reality display. The results show that the motion parallax obtained from the head coupling of perspective is more important than stereopsis in revealing structural information. Overall the results show that three times as much information can be perceived in the head coupled stereo view as in the 2 0 view.

Most systems for visualizing large information structures use 2D graphics to view networks of nodes and arcs that represent data. To understand large structures it is often necessary to show both small-scale and large-scale structure. This has been called the problem of focus and context. Distortion, rapid zooming, elision, and multiple windows are all techniques that have been developed to provide both focus and context within single representations. We review these techniques and argue that 3D visualization has a number of advantages. A system called NestedVision3D (NV3D) will be presented that has been developed to investigate the use of 3D visualization for understanding the structure of large computer programs.NV3D is a system for visualizing large nested graphs using interactive 3D graphics. It has been tested with graphs containing more than 35,000 nodes and 100,000 relationships. We describe NV3D and its design philosophy. Basic navigation is facilitated by a set of 3D widgets, rapid scaling, and interactive elision. More experimental features include animations called snakes, which are used to trace dynamic software behavior.7/18/00 3Parker et. al.

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This paper introduces six graphical principles for 3 0 network displays. These are justified with examples from GraphVisualizer3D, a system developed by the authors to investigate the problems of 3 0 visualization of information networks. GraphVisualizer3D enables the exploration of sulface color, surface texture, object shape, arc shape and labeling conventions.