Microsoft Research Talks About Holograph, An Interactive, 3-D Data-Visualization Research Platform

Microsoft Research today revealed about their new project called Holograph. Holograph is an interactive, 3-D data-visualization research platform that can render static and dynamic data above or below the plane of the display using a variety of 3-D stereographic techniques. The platform enables rapid exploration, selection, and manipulation of complex, multidimensional data to create and refine natural user-interaction techniques and technologies, with the goal of empowering everyone to understand the growing tide of large, complex data sets.

During Microsoft Research’s Silicon Valley TechFair, Microsoft Research scientist Curtis Wong demonstrated this project. Watch the video above.

Holograph enables users to examine various types of dynamic data sets—easily and naturally.

“If you have 3-D data, you could move your head around and look at things as if they were physically there,” Wong suggests. “That’s a natural way of observing something. If you want to reach in and select something that’s interesting, you could find out more information. Sure, you could do that on a flat screen, but on really complex, non-two-dimensional data, it becomes more of a challenge.

“What we’re doing with our Perceptive Pixel display and things like Kinect is tracking where your head is, where your point of view is, and dynamically altering that data. The touch capabilities of the Perceptive Pixel display allow us to understand where you’re touching and then have that touch point connect with a piece of 3-D data represented below the plane of that screen. We’re rendering 3-D data both statically and dynamically in what looks like a virtual box below the glass, but you can see the dimensionality of the data.”