3DArcLens: Interactive Network Analysis on Geographic Surfaces

Geographic datasets such as international telecommunications traffic, financial flows, trading patterns, and national migration patterns describe the movement of entities between geographical locations. In spatial relations analyses the exact route of the connections is not important. Hence, one of the most preferred methods for its depiction is a graph representation with data nodes layered over a geographical surface (such as a flat map or a virtual globe). However, a large number of arcs can produce dense visual clutters that make difficult the extraction of information from: occluded geographical surfaces, occluded nodes and occluded arcs. In this work we present a novel focus+context technique for 3D virtual environments that interactively distorts and filters arcs layouts, revealing underneath information about the three aforementioned visual elements: nodes, arcs and geographical surface. Moreover, changing the camera does not affect the geographical focus of the lens. In our use cases, we observed that such technique is an advantage for tasks that include the exploration of geographical networks.