Daden Ltd. and VoxVue deliver immersive experiences about real places

by Erica Driver and Sam Driver. 

One of the most compelling use cases for work-related use of the Immersive Internet is data visualization, which allows people to quickly see, analyze trends and patterns in, and collaborate on complex data. Lots of jobs require people to analyze, extract meaning from, share and collaborate on, and take action on complex and ever-changing data. Traditionally, this data is in text form, spreadsheets, or 2D images and charts, all of which take time for people to assemble and digest. Immersive Internet apps that provide a high degree of data realism have the potential to reshape the way jobs like these get done by giving people access to rich visual information via an immersive, contextual experience. (For more of our thoughts about data realism, see the ThinkBalm articles, A realism model for Immersive Internet apps: Part 1 and A realism model for Immersive Internet apps: Part 2.)

Recently we had briefings with two technology companies that have created immersive data visualization solutions to help people consume information about real places: buildings, neighborhoods, and even cities. VoxVue Corp. is a Waltham, MA-based software vendor that built an Immersive Internet application for the commercial real estate industry called VoxVue/RE. Daden Limited is a virtual worlds development company based in Birmingham, UK that created a Virtual Briefing Hub in Second Life. Both of these companies have created mashups by integrating their own or third-party tools with Google Maps or a mirror world like Microsoft Virtual Earth and, in Daden Ltd.’s case, a virtual world.  

• VoxVue/RE: commercial real estate visualization. VoxVue/RE is a software application that combines data from Microsoft Virtual Earth with search, analytics, and presentation tools, as well as 3D models and other data about commercial real estate properties and neighborhoods. Urban planners, commercial brokers, architects, engineers and others in the commercial real estate sector can use VoxVue/RE to quickly get detailed information about properties. A commercial broker, for example, would use his mouse to “fly over” an area – let’s say Boston – and zoom in on a 3D model of a commercial building – let’s say the Prudential Tower. He would then hover his mouse over or click on the model of the tower to apply a filter and display information like vacancy rates, list of tenants by floor, lease terms and expiry dates, square footage of units, condition of units — even floor plans or the view from a particular place in the tower. VoxVue customers can use the 3D shapes Microsoft provides with Virtual Earth or import models they create using tools like Autodesk 3ds Max and Google Sketchup. Currently, VoxVue/RE does not have built-in collaboration tools or support for avatars, which limits a sense of shared experience among people using the software. Any shared experience would typically happen by multiple people sitting in front of the same computer screen, as in a sales meeting.
• Daden Ltd.’s Virtual Briefing Hub: Google Maps integrated with Second Life. Daden Ltd.’s Virtual Briefing Hub is part of a city-wide initiative called Digital Birmingham, sponsored by the Birmingham City Council in the UK. People represented by their avatars can meet in the Virtual Briefing Hub where they can all sit down and share the same view of Google Maps. They can click on preset pushpins stuck into the map and get geocoded information like BBC and CNN news feeds, photographs, simplified 3D renderings of buildings, and panoramic views. People can interact with Google Maps in this immersive environment using clickable navigation aids Daden Ltd. built into its map controller or text chat commands like “find London.” Imagine the implications for epidemiology (if it was integrated with real-time disease outbreak information), healthcare planning (if planners could meet in this environment to discuss the location of healthcare resources), or disaster relief planning (by viewing, for example, refugee migration data).

These solutions and others like them allow people to quickly gain insights from complex data directly in the context of their work activity (e.g., see the view from a floor in a building while viewing an office floor plan in VoxVue/RE, or clicking on a news feed pushpin attached to a particular neighborhood while discussing that neighborhood with colleagues in Daden’s Virtual Briefing Hub). And, importantly, the Immersive Internet extends the reach of data visualization. Participants in a business process can bring in colleagues or experts or share information with external parties (e.g., customers) in ways they simply haven’t been able to before.

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