Class Materials

Pragmatic Realism in VR Visualizations of Data There is a plethora of information about data visualization and as many ways to visualize as one might imagine. Both good and bad methods.

There are many sources of open source data and data visualization: Just a couple websites are: • Big Data: 20 Free Big Data Sources Everyone Should Know o http://www.smartdatacollective.com/bernardmarr/235366/big-data-20-free-big-data-sources-everyone-should-know • US open source data site o www.Data.gov • Global open data on businnesses at NYU o http://www.opendata500.com/

Data visualization websites: • Github D3 gallery o https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki/Gallery o The UCLA Statistical online computational resource  http://socr.ucla.edu/

Big data is really at the heart of what business wants to understand and to be able to act on. • Walmart has built a data analytics center to handle analyze and take action based on 40 petabytes of data coming from 20,000 stores in 28 countries. o http://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/01/23/really-big-data-at-walmart-real-time-insights-from-their-40-petabyte-data-cloud/#7d19a0352cc5

The issue we are exploring here is whether or not Virtual reality environments can be created that have a pragmatic reality beyond entertainment. A search on using vr in visualizing data analytics turns up lots of experimental work but nothing as of yet definitive.

Virtual Reality “It’s not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way that I’ve never seen before in any other medium.” Chris Milk, Ted Talk, “ The Ultimate Empathy Machine”, Published on Apr 22, 2015 https://youtu.be/iXHil1TPxvA • VR has multiple uses o Making convincing arguments  A good example of VR as a tool used to invoke emotional response is this story about the loss of Coral Reefs by Conservation International. • http://www.conservation.org/stories/vr/Pages/valens-reef.aspx o Entertainment  Video Gaming  Movies  New media Augmented Reality • Has multiple uses o F 35 Jet helmut o Virtual drilling rig training to avoid hazard for new employees o Medical surgery In a google word trend search really only in 2016 does the expression virtual reality bump. So this space is still really nascent. According to research into where VC institutional and strategic monies are flowing, one of the biggest areas is the intersection of big data ai/ learning algorithms and VR in 2017 Great resource: https://Haptic.al Big and small business are investing into VR as an asset often with an open expectation that the business model and ROI will come eventually.