Aesthetic-Driven Navigation for Node-Link Diagrams in VR

Visual network exploration is essential in numerous disciplines, including biology, digital humanities, and cyber security. Prior research has shown that immersive, stereoscopic 3D can enhance spatial comprehension and accuracy in exploring node-link diagrams. However, 3D graphs can present challenges, including node occlusion and edge crossings, which necessitate continual manual perspective adjustments. We introduce a virtual reality (VR) framework that assists users in navigating to optimal viewing points based on their current task, addressing these issues. The framework quantifies the perceptual quality of viewports based on graph drawing aesthetics suggested by the literature. This information is then visualized in two ways: on a spherical 3D representation surrounding the user and on a handheld 2D overview map. Users can interact with both representations to easily adjust their viewpoint. Moreover, they can interactively combine different aesthetics to discover the optimal viewing points for their specific tasks. Two qualitative evaluations involving law enforcement and biology experts demonstrate the value of our approach. Domain experts reported that the suggested viewports corresponded to their intuition and simplified the process of finding task-supportive perspectives with minimal interaction. Our approach can be incorporated into existing VR graph exploration tools, improving the initial perspective selection and reducing manual navigation.