Radial Cursor: an Efficient Technique to Explore Radial Hierarchy Visualizations on Touch Screens

Mouse hover is a common and effective solution in data visualization applications to deal with the "representation problem". Yet it remains un-developed or overlooked with touch screens, which has recently gained popularity in both people's daily life and research studies. In this paper, we proposed an interaction technique named radial cursor, which uses a radial metaphor and functions similar to a mouse cursor. It stimulates 'mouse hover' interaction with radial hierarchical data on touch screens. Together with a level switch, radial cursor provide intuitive and effective controls of 'hover to see more detail' or 'hover to highlight' over every data node. We also applied real dataset such as Flickr taxonomy and Flare package to our design. The result shows radial cursor helps user to quickly get a general sense of an unfamiliar dataset, or review the known dataset. Meanwhile, radial cursor provides a pleasant data exploration experience.