http://www.caida.org/tools/visualization/walrus/
Walrus is a tool for interactively visualizing large directed graphs in three-dimensional space. By employing a fisheye-like distortion, it provides a display that simultaneously shows local detail and the global context.
"Walrus is a tool for interactively visualizing large directed graphs in three-dimensional space. It is technically possible to display graphs containing a million nodes or more, but visual clutter, occlusion, and other factors can diminish the effectiveness of Walrus as the number of nodes, or the degree of their connectivity, increases. Thus, in practice, Walrus is best suited to visualizing moderately sized graphs that are nearly trees. A graph with a few hundred thousand nodes and only a slightly greater number of links is likely to be comfortable to work with.
Walrus computes its layout based on a user-supplied spanning tree. Because the specifics of the supplied spanning tree greatly affect the resulting display, it is crucial that the user supply a spanning tree that is both meaningful for the underlying data and appropriate for the desired insight. The prominence and orderliness that Walrus gives to the links in the spanning tree, in contrast to all other links, means that an arbitrarily chosen spanning tree may create a misleading or ineffective visualization. Ideally, the input graphs should be inherently hierarchical.
Walrus uses 3D hyperbolic geometry to display graphs under a fisheye-like distortion. At any moment, the amount of magnification, and thus the level of visible detail, varies across the display. This allows the user to examine the fine details of a small area while always having a view of the whole graph available as a frame of reference. Graphs are rendered inside a sphere that contains the Euclidean projection of 3D hyperbolic space. Points within the sphere are magnified according to their radial distance from the center. Objects near the center are magnified, while those near the boundary are shrunk. The amount of magnification decreases continuously and at an accelerated rate from the center to the boundary, until objects are reduced to zero size at the latter, which represents infinity. By bringing different parts of a graph to the magnified central region, the user can examine every part of the graph in detail."
| Source | Walrus is being developed by Young Hyun at CAIDA |
| Difficulty | Unknown |
| Compatibility | Linux, Mac, PC. Java required. |
| Rating | 0 |
| Language | en |