Data Reality
Tags: Mass Shootings, Gun Violence, Data Visualization, Virtual Reality, VR

The reporters and designers at the Washington Post created this interactive article visualizing the incidents and victims of mass shootings. Instead of plain text and numbers, here we see silhouettes of humans. It feels a lot more emotional than the spreadsheet above, as those victims become more tangible to readers. This way of visualizing each item of the dataset with an individual visual mark, instead of aggregation or representation, is called Unit Visualization. It is intuitive and concrete; when the visual marks are humanoid, it becomes personal and emotional.

“But it still seems so abstract and distant,” you may think. Even though we can see individuals on the website, but they are still only on the screen, flat and still. Unit visualization in installation arts may provide the most emotional interpretation of this data :

“Mazamet Ville Morte” by Michel Tauriac

In Mazamet Ville Morte, artist Michel Tauriac asked the entire population of Mazamet, France, to lie on the pavement, evoking the total number of French motor vehicle deaths in 1972. By utilizing a similar technique as unit visualization, its emotional and informational engagement surpasses any visualization we see on screens and paper.

Could we bridge the gap between installation art and data visualization? Researchers at University of Calgary might have the answer. They have invented a new implementation of unit visualization with the help of VR technology called Immersive Unit Visualization, as described in “3-D unit visualization created for exploration in an immersive environment”. With help from VR, scientists visualize the same database of mass shooting victims in an engaging 3-D experience.

(Images from original research paper)

The VR experience generates one 3D model for each of the victims in the database. And to avoid uncomfortable uncanny valley effects, the models are gray low poly figures. Users can navigate the experience with intuitive pinch to zoom gestures. There are a couple of advantages of this visualization.

Easy scale transition and navigation

The VR visualization allows users to quickly change the scale and switch perspectives when they view it. Viewers can easily jump between a bird-eye view or a close-up to the person. Also, they can teleport to any other location instantly. None of these can be achieved in art installations.

Immersive exploration

With VR technology, immersive data visualization can emulate the experience of exploring physical unit visualization or installation art. Viewers can build a strong understanding by leveraging their spatial memory and spatial reasoning just as they would in the physical world. What’s more, it does not require the same large space and investment as installation art does.

Emotional connection

Anthropomorphism is the process of imposing human characteristics on non-human entities. It makes non-human objects tend to “be associated with emotional and empathetic responses”. The visualization of mass shootings from The Washington Post anthropomorphized the data marks. But researchers in the field of data visualization are divided on whether 2-D anthropomorphic charts have an impact on viewers’ level of empathy.

However, in the immersive data visualization, characters can just be just as life-like in real life. Viewers can ask questions or touch them directly, and they will interact as if the VR characters are real. This means the viewer can build a strong emotional connection with the data, better than the humanoid 2-D silhouette figures.