INFORMATION VISUALIZATION ON SPHERES - Information Visualisation: Techniques, Usability and Evaluation - page 27

Fig. 2.4. Spherical image browsing in Vizible [Gal03] and Videosphere [Roc09],
vs image browsing at Bing.com.
Previous spherical visualizations
Information visualization on a sphere is not new - for example,
visualcomplexity.com has 32 entries for sphere-based graph visualizations,
and “A Visual Survey of Tree Visualization” [Jur10] has eight sphere-
based tree visualizations.
Munzner [Mun97] has constructed spherical tree visualizations (e.g.
[Mun98], [Mun00]). Munzner's paper specifically notes that the layout has
been tuned to achieve a balance between density and clutter.
In [Hug04] the authors conclude of their 3D spherical tree viewer:
“While the 3D hyperbolic visualization of phylogenetic trees will not fully
supplant 2D viewers, it can serve as an additional module to augment
other visualization components.”
Sprenger et al. [Spr97] represented any graph on a sphere using
physically-based models and hypothesized that it would work well with
future direct-manipulation user interface paradigms, such as force-
feedback. Later researchers have explored similar visualizations of nodes
on a sphere, e.g. [Osi08]. Insphere [Oli02] uses a head-mounted display to
interact with a hierarchy of spheres. OntoSphere [Bos06] presents
ontological relationships on a sphere.
Fig. 2.5. Sample data visualization spheres of hierarchies and netorks.
[Mun97], [Hug04], [Spr97], [Osi08], [Oli02].