Animated Social Network Visualization

Echelon has posted some nice experiments using 3d tools for visualizing a social network. It's early days, so worth keeping an eye on to see where this work goes. I've taken the liberty of embedding one of the video here. I believe there are some principles governing the right and wrong way to present networks in visualizations. I'm not quite sure what they are, but for me, it is vital that the visualization allow the viewer to locate globally where they are. Things change when three dimensions are used, especially when the user can change their point of view dynamically. Perhaps, beyond the basic view, there is a need for some HUD-like additional information at least indicating the orientation of the viewer (compass information - a tool like those used in Google Earth and Microsoft's Virtual Earth - might be appropriate).

Comments

[Skye Bender-deMoll]

You might be interested in some animations of time-based network data...

http://www.stanford.edu/group/sonia/examples/index.html

best,
-skye