Topology-Preserving Off-screen Visualization: Effects of Projection Strategy and Intrusion Adaption

TL;DR

This paper investigates how different projection strategies and adaptive border intrusions in topology-preserving off-screen visualization affect user perception and understanding, proposing an orthographic projection for better topology reflection.

Contribution

It introduces an adaptive border intrusion method and compares radial and orthographic projection strategies, providing empirical evidence for their effects on topology preservation.

Findings

Orthographic projection improves topology reflection for unconnected point data.

Adaptive border intrusion enhances user perception of spatial relationships.

Participants preferred orthographic projection for better topology understanding.

Abstract

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.