Data Visualization of Crime Data using Immersive Virtual Reality

Abstract

Visualization explores quantitative content of data with human intuition and plays an integral part in the data mining process. When the data is big there are different analysis methods and approaches used to find inherent patterns and relationships. However, sometimes there is a need to incorporate human in loop approach to find new patterns and relationships. Immersive virtual reality (VR) offers a human centric approach to visualize data by discovering new relationships that an existing algorithm cannot provide. This paper demonstrates the data visualization tool to visualize Baltimore crime data in immersive environment and non-immersive environment. This paper focuses on VR visualization tool design, development, and usability assessment. A pilot user study was conducted for the VR visualization tool based on the system usability scale. The study results show that the crime data visualization tool is relatively easy to use, and that the application can be considered as a storyteller with removing the noise from the data and highlighting the usefulness of the information.