FEATURE6 March 2017

Data interaction in 3D

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Bronwen Morgan

Data analytics Features Technology

Virtual reality isn’t a new concept, but the technology has attracted huge investment in recent years and is now much more accessible. This could be good news for researchers, writes Bronwen Morgan

Data interaction in 3d

Virtual reality (VR) went mainstream in 2016: Oculus Rift – the Facebook-owned system – arrived on the UK high street in September (it had been available in the US and online earlier in the year), as did rivals HTC Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR. 

As VR’s reach extends far beyond its gaming roots, Matt Ratcliffe, co-founder of Masters of Pie – a creative software development studio that works with virtual and augmented reality (AR) technologies – believes it could help extract more value from data.

Last year, Ratcliffe and his team won the EPIC Games and Wellcome Trust Big Data and VR Challenge. This was designed to find games companies – or people who worked with game technology – that could help solve the problem of navigating and finding connections, trends and solutions among the huge data sets being gathered every minute by industries around the world.

Masters of Pie, alongside 3D software development consultancy Lumacode, worked with researchers ...