Last week a colleague at my newspaper told me about Oculus Rift experiments by data visualization experts. It seems logical to use virtual reality for data visualization – after all that’s what people also did and I guess still do in virtual environments such as Second Life and OpenSim. Personally I never did much more than 3D brainstorming by putting up media billboards showing videos and websites about a certain topic. I (my avatar) walked around those things and meditated, making all kinds of associations.
I did some browsing to find more compelling examples of data visualization, and these are some must-read articles:
– Mike Wheatley at SiliconAngle.com explains how Virtual Reality brings Big Data visualization to life. He talks about engineers using OpenSim for visualization experiments and the development of a 3-D data browser based on the Unity3D game development engine “capable of rendering 100,000 data objects in about 15 seconds onto a bog standard 2011 Macbook Air”.
– Andy Greenberg on Wired wrote about the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) turning Oculus into a Weapon for Cyberwar. The real use by soldiers is still years away, but the researchers envision a future in which similar devices could be used for offensive hacking as well as defense and reconnaissance.
– Fidelity Labs, Fidelity Investments’ R&D think-tank, has launched StockCity, a virtual-reality view of an investor’s portfolio. I still have to test it, it seems something between a useful visualization tool and a marketing gadget, but here is a video:
– Arch Virtual ran a story about City Planning and Urban Design with Oculist Rift and they published an e-book about Unity3D and Architectural Visualization (including a chapter about the Rift).
So lots of experimenting going on, still early phase.
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