Visual Community Detection: An Evaluation of 2D, 3D Perspective and 3D Stereoscopic Displays

Abstract

3D drawing problems of the 90s were essentially restricted on representations in 3D perspective. However, recent technologies offer 3D stereoscopic representations of high quality which allow the introduction of binocular disparities, which is one of the main depth perception cues, not provided by the 3D perspective. This paper explores the relevance of stereoscopy for the visual identification of communities, which is a task of great importance in the analysis of social networks. A user study conducted on 35 participants with graphs of various complexity shows that stereoscopy outperforms 3D perspective in the vast majority of the cases. When comparing stereoscopy with 2D layouts, the response time is significantly lower for 2D but the quality of the results closely depend on the graph complexity: for a large number of clusters and a high probability of cluster overlapping stereoscopy outperforms 2D whereas for simple structures 2D layouts are more efficient.

Exploring the limits of complexity: A survey of empirical studies on graph visualisation

“…Nine additional studies use graphs with more than 200 nodes. Similar to the above, some of these studies only show subparts of the network [34,82,101,133], while some evaluate tools that scale well with large networks [26,27,34,52,53,59,82,133]. Four out of these nine studies have also used networks with less than 100 nodes.…”

HeloVis: A Helical Visualization for SIGINT Analysis Using 3D Immersion

“…3D charts extend the correlation on a row to three attributes or more if we consider other visual variables [6]. Concerning its use, some recent studies have proven cluster detection to be more effective on stereoscopic displays [8], implying the use of stereoscopic screens or immersive devices. But 3D representations still face occlusion and distortion issues that call their use into question [16].…”

“…Adding this attribute requires identifying three-dimensional shapes that is done best using 3D with depth [8]. In parallel, here we propose to use immersive 3D, which increases the display area and therefore the management of large amounts of data.…”

3D-Stereoscopic Immersive Analytics Projects at Monash University and University of Konstanz

“…(2) as well as sending them to the remote site over a secure connection (3). Both sites can simultaneously annotate content using the touch enabled interaction clients (1), (4 …”

“…Whereas Visual Analytics [2], [3] usually tend to provide 2D visualization-based solutions, Immersive Analytics makes broad use of 3D visualization and therefore largely profits from Stereoscopic 3D (S3D) technologies [4]. And this is usually done by immersing the user into virtual environments representing the data to be analyzed.…”