philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

DataVRse

"What we are doing is basically we are synthesizing new environments which are basically data-driven," he says. "You step in a room while wearing your virtual reality goggles, and you're in a new environment that is constructed from the data. You get to develop some sort of gut feeling for what is normal in that environment."

Inside the DataVRse, for example, medical researchers might explore data from patients through sound, taking advantage of how humans process noise through each ear.

"Just the pattern of me walking in the data, without me even knowing, it's solving a very hard machine learning problem," he says. "Because I always tend to face the source of the sound . . . Those paths that we take, by walking in data, it turns out that they efficiently cluster and partition the data."

"If I'm a heart surgeon, by just walking in that space, in that direction that I feel something abnormal is coming from that direction, I can identify a whole system of genes that take part in that disease," he says. "So removing a lot of UI and analytics and statistics and mathematics that is involved in data analysis, and basically using the human brain in the right way, we can use our own faculties to process large amounts of data very quickly."

To look at health issues, one of the things the researchers want to study is the large patterns about food that can be found in tweets, Instagram posts, and other social media, helping use that data to untangle the complex systems that govern why people choose to eat particular foods.

See the full story with videos here: https://www.fastcoexist.com/3066210/in-this-immersive-dataverse-you-can-explore-big-data-using-your-senses