Visual Analytics in 3D Virtual Worlds

ckpicker — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 00:26:34 GMT

One of the most important challenges of the information age is to effectively utilize the immense wealth of data and information acquired, computed and stored by modern information systems. Visual Analytics (VA) aims to make the best possible use of these huge information loads across a wide variety of applications by appropriately combining the strengths of intelligent automatic data analysis with the visual perception and analysis capabilities of the human user.

More simply, visual analytics uses computers to visually convey the data context(s) and puts decision-making back in the hands of humans.

VA integrates new computation and theory based tools with innovative interactive techniques and visual representations to enable human information discourse. The design of the tools and techniques is based on cognitive, design, and perceptual principles. People use visual analytics tools to interact with and synthesize information; derive insight from massive, dynamic, ambiguous and often conflicting data; detect the expected and discover the unexpected; provide timely, defensible and understandable assessment; and communicate assessment effectively for action. VA requires significant compute resources on both the client and the server to transform large amounts of complex data into visual metaphors that are naturally interpreted.

Visual Analytics has relevance to the following business domains:

· Medical Informatics and Visualization – volumetric visualization of MRI data in real time, e.g. for early detection of colon cancer in the intestinal folds

· Scientific Communities – e.g. Satellite Data, Weather, Natural Disasters, Disaster response, Environmental monitoring

· Enterprise Analytics

o Computer Network loading and dynamic allocation

o Compute Resource Allocation and Utilization

o Social Networks

o Supply chain management

· News and media

· Government and Defense; Homeland Security, Disaster management, emergency response

· Financial Industry

· Entertainment Industry

· Education and Training

· Home Energy Management

· Logistics and Transport Industry

Our group was fairly small but definitely passionate about the subject. We had 2 participants providing tools and services in this area and the rest of us were interested users or contributors to the solution space.

Rodney from Interknowledgy is using the WPF and doing some work with Microsoft Surface. He described what started out as a Life Sciences application where he used the molecule as the navigation paradigm for organizating related information and collaborative annotations. In essence it was the central topic object around which other attributes and conversations were visually arranged. The used some of the industry standard model descriptions from the domain to generate the molecule visuals. This is then rendered using WPF. THe approach has been extended to autocad files and could be used for other domain objects such as car, ship, etc.

Dave from Agilex is working on the next steate of BI or cognitive BI. He described a 3D space where visuals are on the walls and floors. They went to 3D because they wanted to have more real estate than the traditional flat 2D screen and windows. They support rotate, zoom, and other types of manipulations. People turn "knobs" and the visual models change to enable what if analysis. The first rev started out as a desktop version tailored to the individual. Rev 2 added in underlying database, and other services. THey are working on a US PS 35K user system for budget management.

Surface applications came up like the POC for a hospital in Salt Lake for surgeons to show patients pre or post surgery what had been done. They can draw veins on the surface of the heart and put in Stints etc.

We talked about the power of animations in visualization. Temporal and Physics based animations are examples.

Next we went into the HCI and the shortfalls of tradtional mouse and keyboard in manipulationg data in 3D .

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Visual Analytics in 3D Virtual Worlds