Immersive Analytics and Visualisation - Soft20/Business-Intelligence GitHub Wiki

Assignment 4

Objectives

At this stage of your project development you extend your BI solution with a proposal for applying innovative methods for analysis and visualization of the implemented business data scenarios. Consider 3D visualization and VR/AR/MR techniques. Draw your ideas on paper or digital surface and add it to your project assets. Elaborate on the benefits of applying such techniques for data analytics and visualization in BI.

Introduction

As shown in the image above there is a significant difference between virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality. Virtual reality is when everything you see is an artificial environment, whereas augmented and mixed reality only adds partial virtual elements in your real-world environment. Augmented reality adds a filter of some sort on top of the natural environment around you, while mixed reality gives the possibility to interact with virtual objects on a fixed location.

Pros and Cons of using Virtual Reality in Business Intelligence

Pros

  • Gives a better point of interest for the audience for the story telling/dashboard.
  • Gives a better representation for 3D diagrams compared to 3D diagrams on a 2D screen.
  • Custom real time interactions while multiple people are using the same dashboard.
  • Data clusters, patterns, outliers ect. can easily be identified.
  • More visual data can result in better understanding.
  • More entertaining by providing a more game-like experience.

Cons

  • Too much data can reduce the overview and context.
  • 3D space is still limited to understanding tables with a lot of columns.
  • Visualization is more time consuming.

Virtual Reality in relation to our Business Intelligence project

In relation to Tableau dashboards, VR and AR could be used as an alternative with multiple options to interact with the multiple features of the dashboard. More details could be applied due to the additional dimension and therefore extend the user's perception of the data.

social media graph

The diagram above visualize the use of the different social media platforms between the years 2002 and 2019 compared to the increase of depression among adults during the same years.

aggregated data

We have aggregated the usage of social media platforms to summarize the overall usage by year. With the new summarized data, we could create a three dimensional diagram in a virtual environment displaying the specific years on the x-axis, the social media growth on the y-axis and the depression growth on the z-axis.

As shown below is a 3D model of the usage of Facebook as a social media platform and the growth of depression through the years of 2011 to 2019.

Conclusion

Because Business Intelligence methods keeps developing, 3D visualization will inevitably become more utilized in presentations, story telling and dashboards.
If the time had allowed it and we had the required equipment, it would have been exciting to get more acquainted with the subject of virtual reality and perhaps develop a project ourselves.