Monday, August 1, 2016

Exploring Data Visualization of VR

VR has the potential to revolutionize the content industry and using it, has discovered the whole new way to analyze human behavior as audiences consume media. Analytics about consumer media have always been regarding understanding demographics, gauging performances and calculating ad revenue. New VR introduces the opportunity for exploring and understanding how people can get engaged with content.


With earlier video, VR allows us to track where the people look. This generates wonderful amount of data which represents everyone’s experience in a field of VR content. VR analytics is a platform which was made to harness this data and exposing it in many innovative ways. The aim was to make the data as meaningful and accessible as possible and provide unprecedented access to understanding and monetizing user engagement.

Picture Courtesy:- www.nytimes.com

One way to expose the data was through heatmap visualizations of where people looked at in VR. Using color variants superimposed onto the real 360 degree video (VR) screen, the representation of density of viewers looking at each area throughout the video was possible. The result consisted of beautiful fluid heatmap visualization which describes how people engaged with the scene.

Statistical method of cluster analysis was used to further analyze this data to find the “hotspots” which are important areas of interest throughout any immersive experience. Performing the calculations and finding those hotspots need to be distributed over a number of machines in the cloud because it involves so much data and processing, and the computation takes hours.

Picture Courtesy:- cdn.pocket-lint.com

After cluster analysis is done, the movement types exhibited by people at these hotspots are analyzed and conclusions about audience’s response have been made. There are endless opportunities to explore this type of data and it has all just started.

One industry that will be greatly affected by VR analytics is marketing and advertising. It can be determined what people see if we know where they are looking for. For enabling the platform to identify objects in VR, this information helps in knowing what people look at them and their behavior.  This data becomes meaningful on a large scale. The platform makes the kind of analysis possible like if a brand wants to know what percentage of people see an ad placement or how different genders respond to a scene.

 Young handsome man in glasses and virtual headphones

It’s a big challenge to create an immersive narrative in VR, especially since viewers may divert their attention from the story so easily. As the heatmap describes, slight movement along the right of the screen drives half the viewers to follow in that direction. When the screen turns on, you can see everyone quickly shifting their focus. Behavior in VR can be studied this way and the platform will help guide storytelling process for future content.

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