How can UTS Data Arena can help your business

Making sense of big data

The UTS Data Arena offers high-end computer graphics pipelines to help make sense of big data. Deep visual immersion can assist industry and government identify patterns, discover trends, and steer research.

The Data Arena can be used for:

• big data exploration with multi-user interaction
• virtual reality architectural site walk‑through
• full-surround 3D stereo video projection
• scientific visualisation of complex data sets
• examine, filter, segment, slice, and classify datasets in immersive 3D stereo
• 3D volumetric display (generation and manipulation of 3D voxels)
• obtain a better understanding of your data – the quality and quantity
• group collaboration in a shared immersive 3D virtual environment
• education, teaching and learning
• research and development.

Already, the UTS Data Arena has been used to generate a 3D volumetric model of a parasite from microscope image slices, identify biological markers in childhood cancer patients, track bacteria, travel through physical structures and create unparalleled computer graphics for film, fashion and entertainment.

See the UTS Data Arena on the inside

Transcript

[Music playing]

 

Speaker: Here we are. It’s completed – we’re in the Data Arena. It feels fantastic to have it up and running. It’s in 3D stereo, it’s all around us, and we’re interacting with the dataset.

 

[Music playing]

 

Speaker: We’re doing something kind of interesting at the Data Arena by combining two worlds. There’s the visual effects feature film world and there’s the data visualisation world, and it seemed so obvious to join them, to build a bridge, and that’s what we’ve done. And we have 20 years of experience in high performance computing, we have 20 years of experience in visual effects, and we can now combine those two so that we can use the current techniques in visual effects to visualise data on high performance computers. And all of this is open source, so we have access to absolutely every piece of code. We can distribute it, we can modify it, we can improve it, we can share it.

 

Speaker: So if you think of the way our brain works, a big proportion of our brain is dedicated to visual interpretation of the world. You know, we look at the world around us. If you think about the way we collect data, you think of data in something like a spread sheet – millions and millions of points of data represented on a spread sheet in the computer in front of you – it’s very hard to interpret .I can bring those millions of rows of data in a spread sheet, map it into the Data Arena, and I can see that data in three-dimensional form, I can delve into it, I can fly through it, I can render it in, you know, different colours, I can explore it at different scales. We’re using the visual power of our brain to be able to interpret it. It’s just a very powerful mechanism for looking for patterns, looking for anomalies, discovering new insights.

 

[Music playing]

 

Speaker: When people first walk into the Data Arena, they really don’t know what to expect. It’s quite a surprise to see the screen surround you; you’re standing in the middle and everywhere you look, there’s data in three dimensions. You can actually – you feel like you can reach out and touch the dataset.

 

[Music playing]

 

Speaker: There’s a number of things that are unusual about the Data Arena. One of the things is that we have a motion-tracking system; there are cameras all around the top that can track markers, so we can hand out a mouse to everyone in the room, and they can say ‘I want to take control’ or ‘I don’t want control anymore.’ These gestures allow you to interact with the dataset, so instead of having just a keyboard or a mouse, we can have these trackers, and you can walk through a building just by pressing forward. You can have 20 people here, and everyone can have a turn. Another interesting feature of this immersive space is there’s a sound system that surrounds us. Data doesn’t have to just be transformed into geometry; we can also use sonification; we can turn data into sound. And it gives you a sense of immersion.

 

Speaker: Students and researchers are going to benefit from the Data Arena by applying it to their problems, and in talking to business, you know, it’s absolutely obvious that they have really interesting and big, challenging problems, so it’s just a natural opportunity to collaborate. All of those problems are data intensive, and we can bring the data from each of those different areas and explore it here in the Data Arena.