3D layout?

[apowers313]

I have been playing around with 3D / VR / AR force directed graphs:
https://forum.babylonjs.com/t/3d-vr-ar-force-directed-graph/49886

How hard would it be to modify your WebGPU code to support 3D force-directed layout?

(btw, the email ldyken53@uab.edu in the README file doesn't seem to work)

[ldyken53]

I checked out the babylon repo, very cool stuff (also updated my email in the README, thanks for letting me know about that).

I've given it some thought, and extension to 3D shouldn't be a big undertaking. The way the quadtree is built could be pretty simply extended by using 3D Morton or Hilbert codes instead of 2D, and the rest of the construction would be the same. The actual formula for calculating forces may need to change slightly, but the way forces are computed between nodes would be the same. That said, I personally don't have cycles for this in the immediate future, but it would be fun/interesting to play around with for someone willing.

[apowers313]

I read through the code to see if I could figure out how to convert it to 3D, but between the WebGPU code and the Morton bit manipulations I think it's going to be quite a bit of learning curve for me. Think there might be a student in harp-lab that would be interested in picking it up as a side-job?

[ldyken53]

I'm not quite sure, that would be a discussion for my advisor . As of now, our first priority is to make an importable NPM package for the 2D layout creation we have, so that it can be used in other projects. After that, extension to 3D would be a next step, but I can't really give a concrete timeline on that yet.

[apowers313]

Submitted PR #12 to help with creating an NPM package.