Human-centered Evaluation of 3D Radial Layouts for Centrality Visualization

Abstract : In this paper we propose improvements to the 3D radial layouts that make it possible to visualize centrality measures of the nodes in a graph. Our improvements mainly relate edge drawing and the evaluation of the 3D radial layouts. First, we projected not only the nodes but also the edges onto the visualization surfaces in order to reduce the node overlap that could be observed in previous 3D radial layouts. Secondly, we proposed a human-centered evaluation in order to compare the efficiency score and the time to complete tasks of the 3D radial layouts to those of the 2D radial layouts. The evaluation tasks proposed are related to the central nodes, the peripheral nodes and the dense areas of a graph. The results showed that 3D layouts can perform significantly better than 2D layouts in terms of efficiency when tasks are related to the central and peripheral nodes, while the difference in time is not statistically significant between these various layouts. Additionally, we found that the participants preferred interacting with 3D layouts over 2D layouts.