Data Visualization Taken to the Next Dimension through VR
By: Georgi Atanasov
Tags: Data Visualization, Dataviz, Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Unity

Besides some plain text that explains where we are heading to and what problems we solve, the page also features delightful graphics and several exciting videos, including a 360-degree panoramic capture of one of our applications. We have even enabled our recent DataViz applications for download, including complete Unity3D projects and source code!

In case you are already curious to see our new web face in action, please go ahead, you may continue reading the post afterwards :)

A Retrospective Look Back

We are developers. It is in our DNA to help other developers and businesses solve their challenges in an elegant and efficient way. Our long-term mission is to democratize the AR VR business application development and reduce the entry level barrier for developers. One way to accomplish our mission was to start building what we have most experience with — a set of UI and non-UI tools, frameworks and components for Unity3D that would reduce the entry level barrier for developers and would eliminate the need for complex user experiences to be continuously reinvented for each and every application.

Naturally, we took that path. If you remember our first post, it was published straight after Microsoft Build 2018, where we publicly revealed our Company’s plans to invest in this space. We imagined that once we create our initial UI for AR VR offering developers would jump on it and we will slowly start delivering on our mission.

Obviously that was not the case and we are on a different path today.

Early Market State of Affairs

You cannot sell components in an early market. There is simply no need.

We learned that from the feedback and traction that we gathered after MS Build ’18. Which was close to zero. Although related to Microsoft’s HoloLens 1, this post summarizes our findings back then. The following list outlines our most recent conclusions:

Most of the businesses are looking to enable AR VR in some form and take competitive advantage from this technology but they struggle to find a valuable use case that’s worth investing in. Often times businesses have this emotional barrier to use today’s AR VR hardware as it is far from being socially acceptable. They would rather stick to conventional methods for solving a problem than putting a helmet on their heads. This is a completely new technology. The development stack heavily involves 3D and game development-like expertise, therefore most of the businesses lack AR VR R&D team(s) and consider applying this technology expensive, with a steep learning curve and with significant initial investment.

As you can tell from the list, what we were trying to solve was directly the third problem — to make the development far more easier. Needless to say, that won’t work until the first two problems are solved. That is, valuable use cases to be defined and businesses being able to see value in the technology. Only then will they be ready to challenge their socially-related barrier of putting a helmet on.

What Else Could We Do?

We spent a lot of time to think what to do and how to do it. We challenged ourselves to leave our comfort zone of building what we can easily do — UI for AR VR — the truth is that the market is simply not there. Instead, we decided to tackle the first two problems first.

While this may sound easy, it was challenging to implement because:

The use case(s) that we needed to find should clearly demonstrate the full glory of the technology. Most, if not all, of the business verticals where AR VR adds value are occupied with various solutions, coming from small to large companies. Our company builds horizontal solutions that fit multiple business verticals — our ultimate goal is to build a horizontal solution as well. Just a use case on a Power Point presentation wouldn’t suffice, the technology needs to be experienced. Thus, a working application should be demonstrated, instead of text and images.

Top Values of AR VR for Business

When we talk about “Technology Value”, we relate to:

Immersive experiences through Stereoscopic 3D