Subspace Shapes: Enhancing High-Dimensional Subspace Structures via Ambient Occlusion Shading
This addresses visualization challenges for users analyzing high-dimensional data, but it is incremental as it builds on existing 3D display methods.
The paper tackled the problem of visualizing high-dimensional data by testing whether 3D shaded displays are more appealing and informative than scatterplots for cluster analysis, finding that users prefer shaded displays and they better communicate spatial relationships, size, and shape of clusters.
We test the hypothesis whether transforming a data matrix into a 3D shaded surface or even a volumetric display can be more appealing to humans than a scatterplot since it makes direct use of the innate 3D scene understanding capabilities of the human visual system. We also test whether 3D shaded displays can add a significant amount of information to the visualization of high-dimensional data, especially when enhanced with proper tools to navigate the various 3D subspaces. Our experiments suggest that mainstream users prefer shaded displays over scatterplots for visual cluster analysis tasks after receiving training for both. Our experiments also provide evidence that 3D displays can better communicate spatial relationships, size, and shape of clusters.