3D Selection Vault

Volume Selection with Force-Directed Spread

Also known as Volume

A scalable sphere on the controller ray is placed around the target region of a 3D graph and fixed; everything outside is hidden and the nodes inside slowly drift apart with a force-directed layout until the target can be picked with the ray.

How it works

The sphere moves with the ray, the joystick sets its depth, and the trigger fixes it; nodes outside fade out and are then hidden. Holding the joystick up spreads the contained nodes with a force-directed layout that keeps the network structure, and down undoes it; the target is then selected with the ray. With 18 participants on 3D node-link graphs of 50, 120 and 200 nodes (Valve Index), plain raycasting was fastest overall; the filter plane kept stable times as graphs grew and was preferred for cluttered graphs, the volume technique was liked but slow, and the fisheye needed the least effort but was liked least.

Papers