Human-centric situational awareness and visualization are needed for analyzing the big data in an efficient way. One of the challenges is to create an algorithm to analyze the given data without any help of other data analyzing tools. This research effort aims to identify how graphical objects (such as data-shapes) developed in accordance with an analyst's mental model can enhance analyst's situation awareness. Our approach for improved big data visualization is two-fold, focusing on both visualization and interaction. This paper presents the developed data and graph technique based on forcedirected model graph in 3D. It is developed using Unity 3D gaming engine. Pilot testing was done with different data sets for checking the efficiency of the system in immersive environment and non-immersive environment. The application is able to handle the data successfully for the given data sets in data visualization. The currently graph can render around 200 to 300 linked nodes in real-time. 
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                            A Study of Mental Maps in Immersive Network Visualization
                        
                    
    
            The visualization of a network influences the quality of the mental map that the viewer develops to understand the network. In this study, we investigate the effects of a 3D immersive visualization environment compared to a traditional 2D desktop environment on the comprehension of a network’s structure. We compare the two visualization environments using three tasks—interpreting network structure, memorizing a set of nodes, and identifying the structural changes—commonly used for evaluating the quality of a mental map in network visualization. The results show that participants were able to interpret network structure more accurately when viewing the network in an immersive environment, particularly for larger networks. However, we found that 2D visualizations performed better than immersive visualization for tasks that required spatial memory. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 1741536
- PAR ID:
- 10388133
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE PacificVis
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1-10
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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