The Reflection Layer Extension to the Stereoscopic Highlight Technique for Node-Link Diagrams: An Empirical Study

The stereoscopic highlighting technique is a new emerging technique that supports using the depth cue in 3D devices to encode some attributes in general node-link diagrams. In this paper, we extend the original stereoscopic highlighting technique by adding an extra reflection layer at the bottom of the graph to help users detecting the highlighted nodes faster and more accurate. We measure the accuracy of this extension in the technique by evaluating the users’ ability of reading the variation of nodes depth values using the proposed reflection layer. We carried out a controlled user-study. The results show that using the depth cue in stereoscopic devices is readable for medium data sizes with at most three or four different layers without the reflection layer, while they were able to read more complicated configurations through the support of the reflection layer with higher accuracy.