It’s a Wrap! Visualisations that Wrap Around Cylindrical, Toroidal, or Spherical Topologies

Traditional visualisations are designed to be shown on a flat surface (screen or page) but most data is not “flat”. Examples include geographic maps, cyclical time series, and networks. This thesis explores a novel class of interactive wrapped data visualisations that continuously wrap around on a 2D projection of surfaces of 3D cylinder, torus, or sphere. For the first time we demonstrate that these interactive visualisations provide benefits for perception over traditional non-wrapped visualisations for geographic comprehension, trend identification, network cluster identification and pairwise value comparisons. We demonstrate that interactive wrapped visualisations are widely applicable to many different data types.