By | Bernard Marr | Internationally best-selling author, keynote speaker, futurist, and strategic business & technology advisor
Do you only think virtual reality (VR) is only for gamers? There are a lot of useful applications for VR aside from gaming, but one of the lesser-known, but potentially even more fun, applications for VR and augmented reality (AR) is for data analytics. Yes, data analysis can be fun when you can “step inside your data®” as BadVr.com, one company that provides an immersive analytics platform, encourages you to do!
AR and VR Could Change the Way We Analyze Data
While bar graphs and pie charts used to be the go-to tools to visualize data, they just aren’t able to illustrate the complexity in the data we collect today.
To leverage the immense amount of data we collect every day, insights need to be extracted by more than just data scientists. Making data easier to understand even for those who don’t have a data background is one of the ways artificial intelligence and augmented/virtual realities can really transform data analytics in an organization. The visualization of data helps users better understand it and recognize patterns. AR and VR help a user interact with the data to make it easier to glean insights. It isn’t often possible to see crucial information such as data clusters at the intersection of several dimensions in traditional 2D data visualizations.
With AR and VR, users can interact with the data—as data can be in front of, behind, above, and to either side of a user, literally surrounding them. VR and AR can make collaboration easier across teams who are in different locations.
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