Section: New Software and Platforms

Cubix

Participants : Benjamin Bach [correspondant] , Emmanuel Pietriga, Jean-Daniel Fekete.

Figure 5. Cubix UI screenshot. a) Cubelet Widget, b) Cell color encod­ ing, c) Cell shape encoding, d) Vertex ordering, e) Time range slider, f) Cell weight filter with histogram indicating edge weight distribution, g) Cell opacity.

Designing visualizations of dynamic networks is challenging, both because the data sets tend to be complex and because the tasks associated with them are often cognitively demanding. Different tasks may require different visualizations and visual mappings, but combined in a simple interface. We developed Cubix [23] (Figure 5 ), a software featuring a novel visual representation and navigation model for dynamic networks, inspired by the way people comprehend and manipulate physical cubes. Users can change their perspective on the data by rotating or decomposing the 3D cube. These manipulations can produce a range of different 2D visualizations that emphasize specific aspects of the dynamic network suited to particular analysis tasks. A range of interactions can be performed on dynamic networks using the Cubix system. We showed how two domain experts, an astronomer and a neurologist, successfully used Cubix to explore and report on their own network data.

More on the project Web page: www.aviz.fr/cubix