Morphing graph drawings in the presence of point obstacles

A crossing-free morph is a continuous deformation between two graph drawings that preserves straight-line pairwise noncrossing edges. Motivated by applications in 3D morphing problems, we initiate the study of morphing graph drawings in the plane in the presence of stationary point obstacles, which need to be avoided throughout the deformation. As our main result, we prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether such an obstacle-avoiding 2D morph between two given drawings of the same graph exists. In fact, this statement remains true even in the severely restricted special case where only three vertices have to change positions. This is in sharp contrast to the classical case without obstacles, where there is an efficiently verifiable (necessary and sufficient) criterion for the existence of a morph. Further, we provide several combinatorial results related to conditions under which the existence of a morph between two drawings of a graph can or cannot be prevented by the placement of a given number of point obstacles.