An Experimental Evaluation of Viewpoint-Based 3D Graph Drawing

Node-link diagrams are a widely used metaphor for creating visualizations of relational data. Most frequently, such techniques address creating 2D graph drawings, which are easy to use on computer screens and in print. In contrast, 3D node-link graph visualizations are far less used, as they have many known limitations and comparatively few well-understood advantages. A key issue here is that such 3D visualizations require users to select suitable viewpoints. We address this limitation by studying the ability of layout techniques to produce high-quality views of 3D graph drawings. For this, we perform a thorough experimental evaluation, comparing 3D graph drawings, rendered from a covering sampling of all viewpoints, with their 2D counterparts across various state-of-the-art node-link drawing algorithms, graph families, and quality metrics. Our results show that, depending on the graph family, 3D node-link diagrams can contain a many viewpoints that yield 2D visualizations that are of higher quality than those created by directly using 2D node-link diagrams. This not only sheds light on the potential of 3D node-link diagrams but also gives a simple approach to produce high-quality 2D node-link diagrams.