Description

Applications supporting navigation in large networks are used every days by millions of people. They include road map navigators, high route visualization systems, and network visualization systems using node-link diagrams. These applications currently provide generic interaction methods for navigation: pan-and-zoom and sometimes bird’s eye views.

This project explores the idea of exploiting the connection information provided by the network to help navigate these large spaces. We visually augment two traditional navigation methods, and develop two special-purpose techniques. The first new technique, called “Link Sliding”, provides guided panning when continuously dragging along a visible link. The second technique, called “Bring & Go”, brings adjacent nodes nearby when pointing to a node.

We have compared the performance of these techniques in both an adjacency exploration task and a node revisiting task. This comparison illustrates the various advantages of content-aware network navigation techniques. A significant speed advantage is found for the Bring & Go technique over other methods.

Article

T. Moscovich, F. Chevalier, N. Henry, E. Pietriga, J.-D. Fekete, Topology-Aware Navigation in Large Networks, CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, pages 2319-2328, April 2009, Boston, USA

ACM DL entry
HAL INRIA entry

Our paper has been featured on the AT&T Research GraphViz's website.

Video

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Pan and ZoomPan and Zoom + highlightingBirds' Eye 1Birds' Eye 2Bring n'Go


Link SlidingLink Sliding SelectionLink Sliding with bundlesLink Sliding Plane RoutesBring n'Go Plane Routes


Graph Visualization Tools using Bring n'Go and Link Sliding

ZGRViewerTulip

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