A User Study on Curved Edges in Graph Visualisation

Abstract

It seems that straight lines seldom occur in natural objects and that humans actually prefer curved lines [1]. Thus it may not seem surprising that in aesthetics, curved lines are often to be preferred over straight ones, as found for example in Hogarth's serpentine Line of Beauty [2]. More recently a number of confluent drawings [3] and bundling [4] methods have been proposed to reduce edge clutter by using curved edges. Inspired by the work of Mark Lombardi, there is also theoretical work [5] that uses curved edges to optimises angular resolution, i.e., keep the angles between adjacent edge uniform.