GAV-VR: An Extensible Framework for Graph Analysis and Visualisation in Virtual Reality

Abstract

The investigation of interactive graph visualisation in stereoscopic 3D has recently gained increasing attention due to promising initial results and the broad availability of required hardware such as Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. While various software frameworks and libraries for (interactive) graph visualisation in 2D exist, there is a lack of corresponding frameworks supporting VR. This hampers the exploration of design choices and the comparison of approaches, especially for the benefits of virtual environments, slows down the development of novel methods, and requires additional effort from researchers to perform these investigations. We present GAV-VR, a framework for interactive visualisation and analysis of graphs in VR. GAV-VR has a modular architecture to support easy integration of visualisation and analysis method implementations. In this work, we elaborate on the framework's architecture and showcase possible use cases.