Completed projects
Teaching buildings to learn and manage the energy they use
Developing the world’s first "cognitive office" able to analyse and learn when to reduce energy consumption. Using historical data and Machine Learning to predict building behaviour we explore the use of immersive technology (Virtual and Augmented Reality) to supply insightful visualisation to building managers.
Spinifex: an R package allowing user-controlled steering of dynamic linear projections of numeric multivariate data
Specifying the rotation of the projection in this way allows for fine exploration of the local structure of a projection. This is an important part of exploratory data analysis of multivariate data, which is hard to visualise as dimensionality increase. Linear projections map back to the original variable space while also viewing more variation than a static projection down to 2- or 3D. Going forward we will extend user-controlled steering and these dynamic projections to immersive 3D virtual reality spaces.
Fader Axes: A Design Space for Spatio-Data Coordination
In partnership with the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VIFM), we have invented and prototyped a novel physical spatio-coordinated interaction (PSI) device we call Fader Axes. This device assists doctors, medical and legal practitioners interact with CT scans or MRI images and extract useful information by leveraging the PSI. This device is pioneering medical investigations as currently 3D images from Medical Imaging Technology are only visualised on 2D computer screens. Even though Augmented and Mixed Reality (AR/MR) technology and mixed-reality head-mounted displays such as the Microsoft Hololens or the Meta 2, allow practitioners to visualise 3D data in an immersive way, interacting with a 3D scan remains challenging. Fader Axes allows practitioners to zoom into certain regions of the body and browse the ‘slices’ of a 3D scan to extract useful information and make a diagnosis. This device features 3D actuated sliders mounted on three physical axes that allow precise selection of axis-aligned regions within a 3D model.
Immersive Flow Maps
How should we visualise origin-destination flow data with virtual and augmented reality? We explore three different spatial encodings for flow maps. Our work suggests that careful use of the third spatial dimension can resolve visual clutter in complex flow maps.
This work was presented and published at IEEE InfoVis 2018.
The Immersive Analytics Toolkit - IATK
IATK is the Immersive Analytics Toolkit, a Unity plugin tool designed to help the creation of interactive visualisations and visual analytics system in extended reality environments. IATK uses a simple grammar of graphics available through the Unity editor and an API to help designers make more advanced visualisations and interactions. The IATK was published at IEEE VR 2019.