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/sci/ - Science & Math

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7224921 No.7224921 [Reply] [Original]

Hey /sci/
Apparently I overestimated the brain trust when I posted this in /3/, but I know there is some grey matter floating around this board...
I'm a math teacher (read: I am pretty good at most math up to the undergrad level, but not past it) and I am interested in the intersection of 3d immersive environments and data visualization, specifically financial and monetary information. I want to create a virtual space to manipulate visualizations of data sets. Because humans are far better at understanding and interpreting 3d spatial relationships than numerical relationships, I think this approach could prove very informative in studying various relationships and correlations. I expect that my project would run on something like the Unreal Engine or the Source engine and I would want to use something like Oculus Rift to visualize it... I only know the most basic ideas of coding (I took a semester of C++ for non CS majors, some html and BASIC). My data sets and streams would originate from various sources, both local and the web.
Questions:
1. In your opinion, what is the level of difficulty to bring something like this to fruition?
2. What skills would be essential to make this happen?
3. What is the best way to learn these skills? I can self-teach, but would it be more efficient to take a course?
4. If a course is the best approach, what course(s) and where from?
5. What am I not thinking about?
Thanks for any advice or info!

>> No.7226304
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7226304

>>7224921

I don't know OP, but sauce on the pic?

>> No.7226323

Both the newest Unreal and Unity engines have pretty capable visual programming things that don't require any coding knowledge.
At any rate, if you've already got the 3d engine and integration with Rift, it doesn't sound too hard.
Don't forget 3d-modeling skills though, you're probably gonna need those.

>> No.7226354
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7226354

>>7224921
First of all, I don't see why you would have any benefit from using unreal or source engine.

1. It's not going to be that difficult to visualize a certain set if you just read and understand basic opengl. All you have to do after that is just arrange data points in space at specific coordinates and assign colours or sizes to the data points or whatever you prefer to use as visualization.

2+3+4. Just basic OpenGL skills really, as long as you learn to draw one item at one point with a given size and colour, and you create a working camera (2 cameras with an offset if you want oculus rift), i guess you're pretty much done.

5. Before you get too excited you should know that in many cases it's a lot easier to understand and interpret data, especially financial and monetary information by just looking at the numbers. There are already tons of programs to visualize 2d and 3d graphs, even wolfram alpha has this, but in lots of cases you will be looking at 5+ dimensions which is not really very helpful to visualize because our brains were only designed to understand 3d.