How VR is Transforming Data Visualization
How do you make data-driven decisions?
You’re a team member, maybe an executive at a company. Could be small, medium, or large. It’s been drilled into your head from day one that you must make ‘data-driven’ decisions. That ‘data-driven’ decisions are the best decisions.
But what does ‘data-driven’ even mean? How does one even access the first step of that two part directive — the data?
You’re not necessarily technical. You don’t know how to write a database query, or how to manipulate large datasets in Python.
What do you do?
Welcome the modern world. Where the need for data and the theoretical value of data is high, but access to it is still difficult. Most data is all but inaccessible to the vast majority of non-technical team members within any given business.
You’ve heard the mantra — ‘make data driven decisions’ — over and over again, but chances are you’ve not been given the tools necessary to make data-driven decisions easy or even accessible.
Take a moment to think about the last time you truly committed to making a data-driven decision. How long did it take? How many resources did you use to gather and visualize the data you needed? Did you have to learn a new tool? Did you have to rely on other talent with your workplace to help you get the information you needed?
I’ll bet you’re exhausted even thinking about the process.
As a former UX designer, and now CEO of BadVR, I feel your pain. I’ve spent weeks, sometimes months, carefully sourcing, gathering, visualizing, and analyzing data to make the correct UX and product decisions. I was also frustrated by the inefficiency of the process, and upset at the lack of accessibility for non-technical team members.
So I found a better way to make ‘data-driven’ decisions.
What if you could put on a headset and see ALL your data, in a fully immersive visual world?
That’s right — what if you could use virtual reality to visualize your data?
There are many aspects of VR that make it a perfect tool to bring data visualization to everyone. Human brains are built to ingest three dimensional data — it’s only over the past 50 years or so that we’ve re-programmed our brains to ingest two dimensional interfaces. And even though we’ve figured out how to do this, our brains function far less efficiently with flat screens, and the scale and complexity of data we can analyze on them is dramatically lower that what we’re capable of analyzing in 3D.
Which is especially unfortunate, given that the total amount of data produced by worldwide companies doubles in size every two years. VR allows a much greater volume of information to be displayed and ingested by humans in ways that don’t demand a lot of effort or highly specialized skillsets.
Think about how much time it would take you to analyze a 1,000 row spreadsheet. Then compare that to the experience of putting on a headset, looking around, and exploring a brand new digital world.
Not only does VR stress your brain less — it also returns an element of joyfulness and playfulness to an otherwise boring work day.
VR has primarily been presented as a toy — perfect for gaming, or watching entertaining content. However, visualizing data is a great use case for the technology. VR can be a useful, engaging tool that can make tedious, laborious, and time intensive work into a simple, fast, playful experience.
Being able to make ‘data-driven’ decisions is very important to all modern businesses. Data is only as valuable as the quality of it’s analysis, after all. So why are we still using pie charts and line graphs — tools that were around before electricity was invented?
It’s time to disrupt the existing tools we use to see, interact, and analyze our data.
Data visualization needs a modern tool, specifically designed for modern datasets, accessible to all users. Virtual reality is the solution.
Join BadVR in the data visualization VR revolution!
