Topology-Preserving Off-screen Visualization: Effects of Projection Strategy and Intrusion Adaption
This work addresses a specific visualization challenge for users navigating large datasets, but it is incremental as it builds on existing off-screen techniques.
The paper tackled the problem of visualizing off-screen objects while preserving their topology in large information spaces, proposing an adaptive border intrusion and comparing radial vs. orthographic projection strategies, with results suggesting orthographic projection is better for unconnected point data in adaptive designs.
With the increasing amount of data being visualized in large information spaces, methods providing data-driven context have become indispensable. Off-screen visualization techniques, therefore, have been extensively researched for their ability to overcome the inherent trade-off between overview and detail. The general idea is to project off-screen located objects back to the available screen real estate. Detached visual cues, such as halos or arrows, encode information on position and distance, but fall short showing the topology of off-screen objects. For that reason, state of the art techniques integrate visual cues into a dedicated border region. As yet, the dimensions of the navigated space are not reflected properly, which is why we propose to adapt the intrusion of the border pursuant to the position in space. Moreover, off-screen objects are projected to the border region using one out of two projection methods: Radial or Orthographic. We describe a controlled experiment to investigate the effect of the adaptive border intrusion to the topology as well as the users' intuition regarding the projection strategy. The results of our experiment suggest to use the orthographic projection strategy for unconnected point data in an adaptive border design. We further discuss the results including the given informal feedback of participants.