Leveraging Data and Spatial Environments to Create immersive Experiences

Tell us a bit about yourself I’m Adam Sauer from Columbus Ohio in the United States where I’ve been since my childhood and now I’m working in the Tech Space. I studied Electrical Engineering and Since Graduation I’ve been focusing a lot on data visualization in 3d environments. I also have a big interests in travelling with a purpose and learning. What is data? What types of data are you working with? What is a spatial environment, and how do these combine in the ecosystem you are creating Data by itself might be a chart or a series of numbers or something that just give information. It could be your bank account budget, or the different turns you took to walk from one destination to the next, or even your social media profile. Usually it’s just a bunch of numbers and text that’s stored in a spreadsheet or some kind of table on a computer in a very boring grid-like form that isn’t fun to look at. It’s really hard to look at all these numbers on a screen and try to figure out how to take something meaningful from that. Our brain is wired to perceive this whole environment around us and basically figure out how to navigate in this 3D space. So much of our brain is trained to process that type of information. So what is really cool is, when you think of infographics or other ways of displaying data, if it’s part of your job to look at all that data every single day then it is so much more useful to basically take all that boring data and put it in this 3D space so your brain can interpret it properly, and visualize certain information in a more efficient way. It’s just about creating a connection between you and your data especially with this emerging technology field of Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality. This is for sure the next iteration of how we interface with technology, or communicate with computers in general. Can you highlight some more advantages I think the biggest impact that this has is the ability to communicate more context of a situation to somebody. Say if a smart city transportation system or power grid or something was designed, the engineers and developers and planners who put together a lot of thought into how a system should function at some point in the development process will have these spreadsheets and data that they can interpret when they are going through it because they’ve spent several hours training on this information. But when you take an outsider who needs to understand that(eg. Data from a natural disaster), then you need other experts to interact with this data to make sense of it. But if you are able to show them a 3D map of this situation, everybody can just get on the same page faster. That’s just one example, but think of things like a general text message or phone call. I’m texting friends and sometimes you don’t know if you’ve sent the right emoji that captures your expression. The fact that I can talk to you and see you here adds so much more ability for us to understand the context of each other’s situation. So the beauty of immersive experience is how it makes these kinds of connections deeper in all fields. Think about education, would you rather read a textbook on chemistry or rather witness electrons spinning around a nucleus in a 3D environment that you can interact with. You now run a company that uses data to create immersive experiences for organizations. Tell us about some of your projects. Circaevum I had a job out of college working at a car manufacturing company. I was in charge of the power coming in through the grid toward the service panels. But I had this crazy… dumb idea for how I thought of time in my head since I was a little kid. I would visualize the earth’s orbit around the sun and I started building that in a studio world, then a friend of mine introduced me to the 3.js javascript library… So I started thinking more about the geometry and the physics and mechanics of how that work was working. Creating that in a virtual environment was my crash course into virtual reality. From there, that developed into a calendar project. It’s still continuously evolving and on one version I am able to get your schedule from calendar events and visualize those in that 3D world. The Bonsai Data Tree There’s also a project we built that we call The Bonsai Data Tree. In Japanese culture, a bonsai means a dwarf tree in a bin. They take a branch of a shrub and then put it in a bin of soil and call it a Dwarf Tree. When they grow well, it actually looks like a really large tree, but shrunk down. The idea here is to create a minimized tree structure that you are trying to keep small. So we took that concept and applied it to these datasets. Initially you start with your hard drive, we take that and make that the trunk of a tree. And then each subfolder you have is a different branch. And the amount of data in each of the subfolders correlates to the thickness of the branch. So if I have a lot of data in my videos folder, that branch is going to be thicker than that of my pictures folder which has very few pictures. As you go into these nested folders, those will be further broken apart branches with files as leaves and fruits. We haven’t yet built the leaves and the fruits. We took this to the Smart City Hackathon to figure out useful ways to work with the data they had collected. So we took all the annual budget data for the past 8 years and we made a tree for each one of those. So you could see how as the years changed different people in charge had their ways of categorizing the budget. You could look at all those branches of departments and see actually where all the tax money goes. That actually went well. And we are trying to figure out different ways to use that for all the political, and other budgetary perspective. Starting such a project at a hackathon is a pretty cool component of hacker culture where you could make it open and accessible. What do you think about this quote by Om Malik Augmented reality is the 'boy who cried wolf' of the post-Internet world - it's long been promised but has rarely been delivered in a satisfying way. I have met a lot of people who have believed in this idea for at least 20 years longer and I think the actual idea took a while to grow and if you think about the idea of the smartphone, there were somewhat predictions of what the smartphone should look like, but it had to go through several failed versions before apple successfully came out with the iPhone. The timing was right for people to be open to it and accepting. There are lots of people who put their heart and should into this 20 years ago and didn’t make it out the other end. It’s definitely a boy who cried wolf. But I have to say, the amount of focus that a lot of the top tech companies are putting into this alone tells me that it is definitely going to happen. I have seen a lot of projections that show how the different iteration of tech can pay back so much more in customer/media/entertainment value. From the tech that’s being showcased right now, I think the boy is crying wolf, and we should run because this time there’s a wolf. It is laying a foundation for the future. Especially in this community, a lot of people that are pioneering this technology and coming up with new ideas are people who are very in tune with what it means to be a global citizen and the idea of this global society, that we need to be connected, and supporting that idea. And with everyone that I talk to in this community, it’s weird how naturally our conversation goes to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. At this point the podcast had officially ended, but we spent the next couple of minutes talking about other things you might find interesting. Play the audio to gain access to the exclusives.