Over the past years there have been many new visualizations of data showing all sorts of graphs and layouts. But are we really thinking about new ways to look at data. Imagine using VR glasses and displaying your result set as a galaxy. How open are we to new technologies and what can they bring us?

1. Will Virtual Reality (VR) be changing
the way we deal with information?
By Willem Geert Lagemaat

2. CONTENTS
• Old Ideas for New Perspectives
• Realistic VR Environment
• All-Inclusive VR Environment
• Interacting with VR Environment
• AI as a VR Designer
• Trust and Understandability
• Benefits, downside and challenges
• So….will VR change the way we deal with information?

3. So….
• Lets dream a little….
• Imagine doing a 150,000 results search
• Not limit anything
• Visualize your result set as a galaxy
• Which you can zoom in, walk into and through, rotate and combine…..
• Now lets start with some background and other stuff!

4. Tron, 1982
Old Ideas for New Perspectives

5. Sci-Fi shows some 3D…
Old Ideas for New Perspectives

6. …it’s still mostly 2D surfaces
Old Ideas for New Perspectives

7. 1997: Visualization of Multivariate Data Using 3D and VR Presentations
Batagelj & Mrvar
http://vlado.fmf.uni-lj.si/vrml/paris.97/
Old Ideas for New Perspectives

8. Old Ideas for New Perspectives
2003: Visitor Ville
Visitorville.com

9. Old Ideas for New Perspectives

10. First 3D Environments
Big WOW factor but…
The 3rd dimension may not be useful.
It often made user tasks unecessarily complex.
New Perspectives
Multidimensional data and 3D environments are more common.
Using a 3D environment can help dealing with the data avalanche.
Old Ideas for New Perspectives

11. Realistic VR Environments
Visualizating data endoed as real-world objects enables a more intuitive recall of information.
It can facilitate user orientation in large datasets.
Successful mnemonic techiques also use realistic mental representations.
“The method of loci is an imaginal technique known to the ancient Greeks and Romans […]. The
subject memorizes the layout of some building, or the arrangement of shops on a street, or any
geographical entity which is composed of a number of discrete [locations]. When desiring to
remember a set of items the subject 'walks' through these [locations] in their imagination and
[associate] an item to each one. […] The efficacy of this technique has been well established.”
O'Keefe and Lynn, The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map

12. Realistic VR Environments

13. Realistic VR Environments

14. All-Inclusive VR Environments
Toward multi-functional tool for IR, visual analytics, data mining

15. Ghost in the Shell, 1995
Interacting with VR Environments

16. Interacting with VR Environments
DimpVis, Kondo & Collins, 2015

17. Interacting with VR Environments

18. Trust and understandability
• When entering a VR world, queries no longer traceable
• Enabling interesting results
• Challenges to uncover how results were found
• Many sites and products do this already for you now
• Trusting technology to get and combine results

19. Benefits, downside, challenges
• The addition of VR removes the limitations of scale
• Combining multi dimensional datasets brings significant time benefit
• Platforms for multi dimensional datasets need to be developed
• Limitations on what is technically within the platform
– Ie if the platform only displays forests, that is what you will get
• Conflict of visualization and objectives
• Hardware and display limitations

20. So will VR change the way we deal with
information?
VR is a interesting and attractive topic in the world of data analysis. Many examples and
studies are written on the subject, but so far no real platform has been created to create
virtual worlds. This however, is a matter of time. We will be able to use these technologies
within the next 5 – 7 years.
Our biggest challenge will be do we trust what we see, and do we rely on how we got there.
And that is not a technology question.

21. THANK YOU
Questions?