Category: Imagination

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Complex Data Analytics Become Easier to Understand With VR Platform Lume

Virtual reality (VR) technology can be used for all manner of applications and industries, with global creative agency Imagination in collaboration with the University of Cambridge applying it to data analytics for their latest project, Lume.

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Lume is a VR platform for analysts to better visualize, discover, explore and share their data, making highly complex data intuitive to understand, and patterns easier to recognise.

Lume’s algorithms help bring information to life, making complex and dense datasets tangible and explorable by rendering millions of points from multidimensional datasets in real-time. Points can be scaled, rotated, highlighted and selected in 3D via VR motion controls as well as providing analysis and clustering features such as nearest neighbour analysis, density plots etc.

Describing how the project came to life, Imagination’s Chief Technology Officer, Anton Christodoulou said in a statement: “We created the Imagination Labs Programme to push the boundaries of what is possible when combining creativity and technology, and to support new talent. What began life as a project to explore how new technology could be used to enhance live experiences has transformed into a pioneering passion project for advancing scientific research. I am very excited about the possibilities that Lume offers, which has the potential to lead to incredible scientific discoveries and redefine what we expect from new technologies such as VR.”

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Dr Lee, Founder of the TheLeeLab at the University of Cambridge added: “Although this tool is in its infancy, it has already proven to be invaluable. The whole team have had the privilege of seeing a single human immune cell isolated in VR, which we have physically been able to explore in nanoscopic detail. Imagination has created the multi-user VR environment for researchers to explore, understand, explain and interact with their own point cloud data and we’re very excited to use it here at the University of Cambridge. We envisage this to have a huge impact, not only in our own research community but in lots of other research disciplines.”

Imagination is hoping that Lume will help make new discoveries from complex data and improve public engagement in scientific disciplines. The project is being spun out as a startup, selected to be part of this year’s cohort of Augmentor, the immersive technology acceleration programme of Digital Catapult.

You can even try the application for yourself. It’s currently available as a free Alpha release via Steam, supporting the HTC Vive headset. For further updates on the project, keep reading VRFocus.

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Hammerhead Teams With MLB, HTC & More For Cannes Lions Innovation Festival Presentation

A seminar is usually one of two things.  It is either very engaging or it is boring. There’s very little in the way of middle ground between the two, and if it turns out to be the latter boy is it goign to be difficult to listen to.  Fortunately this doesn’t appear to be the case at the Cannes Lions Innovation Festival where yesterday an unusual five-way partnership of Imagination, Hammerhead VR, Major League Baseball (MLB), HTC Vive, and Dell hosted what they are calling “the world’s first free movement mixed reality (MR) presentation.”

Discussions in the interactive seminar focused on two business areas: brand experience and consumer behaviour and how technology such as virtual reality (VR) could potentially utilise such information. However this was before volunteers were invited to take part in a series of tests involving playing ‘catch’ with a ball.  Being successful would then trigger changes in the world around them.

“The idea of catching a ball is simple.” Explained Steve Jelley, joint Managing Director of Hammerhead VR. “However, if you take this action into mixed reality, it can become a catalyst for creativity that can blend the physical and virtual worlds into a completely new experience. The possibilities of the Vive Tracker are powerful, and very exciting for us as immersive content creators”

The ball was not a regular sort you’d get at the store however. It was instead a 3D printed soft rubber ball that incased an HTC Vive Tracker.  No easy design task as the ball had to be light enough to throw around, soft enough to be safe to actually throw, be something you could physicaly catch, and be able to not just house the Tracker but be open enough for it to be still picked up by the Vive’s lighthouses whilst it’s being tossed around. If the ball suddenly disappeared mid throw you’re going to end up with confusion – and potentially a ball to the face.

The end result took, according to Hammerhead VR, four weeks to develop and 89 hours to 3D print and allowed the team the chance to experiment with people’s expectations as well as alter the environment around them – and even the ball itself.

“The Vive Tracker is an incredibly exciting tool for developers and marketers alike. The technology enables virtually any object to be tracked in the virtual space, from sports equipment to car steering wheels to furniture – there are endless possibilities.” Added Herve Fontaine, HTC Vive’s VP of Business Development. “With the Vive Tracker, it creates an innovative platform for key parts of your brand story to be tracked and represented within VR.”

You can see a short trailer for the session below which shows some of the development that took place. How these developments continue in the future remains to be seen. But should their be any further news we will be sure to cover it on VRFocus.