text: The increasing prevalence of Virtual Reality technologies as a platform for gaming and video playback warrants research into how to best apply the current state of the art to challenges in data visualization. Many current VR systems are noncollaborative, while data analysis and visualization is often a multi-person process. Our goal in this paper is to address the technical and user experience challenges that arise when creating VR environments for collaborative data visualization. We focus on the integration of multiple tracking systems and the new interaction paradigms that this integration can enable, along with visual design considerations that apply specifically to collaborative network visualization in virtual reality. We demonstrate a system for collaborative interaction with large 3D layouts of Twitter friend follow networks. The system is built by combining a 'Holojam' architecture (multiple GearVR Headsets within an OptiTrack motion capture stage) and Perception Neuron motion suits, to offer an untethered, full-room multi-person visualization experience.
  @cite_3: Recent years have witnessed the dramatic popularity of online social networking services, in which millions of members publicly articulate mutual "friendship" relations. Guided by ethnographic research of these online communities, we have designed and implemented a visualization system for playful end-user exploration and navigation of large scale online social networks. Our design builds upon familiar node link network layouts to contribute customized techniques for exploring connectivity in large graph structures, supporting visual search and analysis, and automatically identifying and visualizing community structures. Both public installation and controlled studies of the system provide evidence of the system's usability, capacity for facilitating discovery, and potential for fun and engaged social activity
summary: With , Heer et. al. @cite_3 provided a precedent for social network visualization using force layouts. We provide much of the same basic functionality in VR, but at a much larger scale. Although not the focus of this paper, a Three.js webGL frontend that in many respects resembles a 3D version of Vister is additionally provided by the analysis server (discussed below). One contrast between our work and Vister is that the latter focuses on active layouts, while our layouts are computed ahead of time, due to the larger network size.