NetImmerse - Graph Exploration in Virtual Reality

Featured at Human Computer Interaction International 2022
Featured at Pleasure, Arts and Sciences Festival Maastricht
Exhibition "Touching Abstraction" Brightlands Smart Services Campus 2020

The increasing amount of interconnected data has given rise to a need among researchers and practitioners to develop new approaches to the visualization of network structures. The intricacy of such structures vastly exceeds the capacity of most conventional approaches to network visualization in terms of dimensional and resolution restrictions as they are mostly presented two-dimensional with limited screensize. An additional limition of traditional network visualization tools from a human-computer interaction standpoint is the limited interaction itself where immersion and ‘deep-diving’ into high-dimensional data is not possible. We built NetImmerse, an application to visualize network data in a virtual environment with the ability to overview, zoom, and request details on-demand. Within the virtual space, users have the possibility to either walk around the 3D data representation or rotate and move the representation using the two controllers. We tested the application with users and simulated a representative use case. NetImmerse enabled the participants to gain accurate insights based on the defined task. Participants indicated a PU of 5.25 and a PEOU of 5.46. We believe that NetImmerse is an engaging platform for multi-dimensional data exploration and may result in better insights and enhance the ability of network data exploration.