Aesthetics and comprehension of curved 3D graphs in Virtual Reality

Abstract

Studies and evaluations of 3D graph aesthetics beyond the desktop currently remain sparse, despite recent advancements and applications with the emergence of Immersive Analytics. This paper explores curvature aesthetics for the edges within a 3D graph visualisation and presents preliminary implementations to a Lombardi-inspired rendering for an edge. Additionally, we evaluate three approaches to curvature through two studies to compare against straight-lines as a baseline. The two studies focused on observing user preference and performance when navigating a curved graph without and with topological-based tasks in Virtual Reality (VR). We found that curved edges without specified orientations tended to perform worse in performance and preference compared to Lombardi-inspired implementations of edges. Pupillary response and the participant’s approaches to navigation were also observed to be indicative of the edge’s respective performance for topological-based tasks.