  Traditional visualisations are designed to be shown on a flat surface (screen
or page) but most data is not "flat". For example, the surface of the earth
exists on a sphere, however, when that surface is presented on a flat map, key
information is hidden, such as geographic paths on the spherical surface being
wrapped across the boundaries of the flat map. Similarly, cyclical time-series
data has no beginning or end. When such cyclical data is presented on a
traditional linear chart, the viewer needs to perceive continuity of the
visualisation across the chart's boundaries. Mentally reconnecting the chart
across such a boundary may induce additional cognitive load. More complex data
such as a network diagram with hundreds or thousands of links between data
points leads to a densely connected structure that is even less "flat" and
needs to wrap around in multiple dimensions. To improve the usability of these
visualisations, this thesis explores a novel class of interactive wrapped data
visualisations, i.e., visualisations that wrap around continuously when
interactively panned on a two-dimensional projection of surfaces of 3D shapes,
specifically, cylinder, torus, or sphere. We start with a systematic
exploration of the design space of interactive wrapped visualisations,
characterising the visualisations that help people understand the relationship
within the data. Subsequently, we investigate a series of wrappable
visualisations for cyclical time series, network, and geographic data. We show
that these interactive visualisations better preserve the spatial relations in
the case of geospatial data, and better reveal the data's underlying structure
in the case of abstract data such as networks and cyclical time series.
Furthermore, to assist future research and development, we contribute layout
algorithms and toolkits to help create pannable wrapped visualisations.
