Forget #dataviz As immersive #VR emerges we will experience #datarealization which is the experience of touching, smelling, sensing and physically manipulating data in an immersive data art exhibit.

Imagine putting on your #VR headset and you are in a chart. Not a bar or pie chart, but something totally new - an experience chart. You walk to the right and you see mountainous three dimensional structures. As you walk up to one you touch it and you hear a voice say “sales in December were stronger than usual”. Your turn your head - another apparition materializes with a quick view of last years sales.

Intrigued you walk into this new area, and slowly you start to smell a very sweet chocolate scent. You close your eyes and follow this pleasant scent until you reach a bubble. Inside that bubble you see millions of pictures of representing ad campaigns for chocolates in the last ten years. You touch one of the pictures and it stops, expands and a large holographic box asks you if you want to save to your iPhone. Sure, why not.

This is the world of data realization. All senses are you used to understand and process data. Information is presented to us the way experiences are processed in the real world. We can travel to different data lands, take a dip in the river of streaming tweets, and even climb the mountain of layered security protocols.

Data realization will be about making decisions. But at the beginning it will be more of an art than a science. We will seek out data for the pleasure that elicits in us. Perhaps this will be the first type of immersive data art that humans encounter.

  1. sarcastech reblogged this from sarcastech