Graph Interaction through Force-Based Skeletal Animation

Skeletal animation is a concept that has been used in the areas of motion pictures and computer games to create realistic motion for the animation of articulated characters. Recent work has applied skeletal animation techniques from inverse kinematics to the field of graph interaction. The previous work introduced an interesting idea suggesting a skeletal graph interaction system would be intuitive and natural. However, due to problems with the skeletal animation techniques used, the benefits of the system were limited. This paper investigates the use of a new dynamics based technique previously used in the area of skeletal animation for graph interaction. The motivation for this work was to improve upon the previous work by providing a more intuitive skeletal graph interaction system. An intuitive skeletal interaction system could reduce the difficulty and time taken in navigating the graph and increase the amount of information that can be interpreted and understood. This technique has been implemented in a graph interaction environment in Java3D allowing the user to drag nodes in order to manipulate the layout of the graph. The graph reacts to the user movement while maintaining the physical constraints placed upon it by the skeletal metaphor.