Glasshouse Virtual World Data Graphs are now updated in Real Time

By Jani Pirkola

Green Phosphor has enabled real-time updating of graphs in the virtual world. See yourself how a financial market graph showing s&p500 goes alive!

With some slight modifications to CICP, Green Phosphor has enabled real-time updating of graphs in the virtual world (see also Maxping's previous article Glasshouse injects 3D representation of data into a virtual world, which got slashdotted). The first demo video below is a financial market graph showing s&p500, dow, and other indicators at a 3-second resolution. This video shows how quickly the graph responds to new data as it is pulled into a mysql database by Green Phosphor's little scraping program.

The second video below shows how to put a 3d graph of an Excel spreadsheet into the virtual world, and then modify the spreadsheet and refresh the graph. The same tool (Glasshouse) you will see used to place the spreadsheet into the world can be used to create real-time or time-animated graphs - it can hook up to any jdbc-compatible db and graphs are configured using SQL statements.

Glasshouse is available for free for non-secure (public) use at http://greenphosphor.com/?location=Beta. Ben Lindquist, Founder and CEO of Green Phosphor says, "We are in the process of finishing up our secure subscription service, which keeps your graphs completely private (assuming you have control over a place in a virtual world to rez them) and uses SSL to secure transmission from Glasshouse out to our hub and from our hub to the virtual world."

Green Phosphor will give a lifetime subscription to any developer who is the first to fully implement CICP within any popular open-source virtual world platform. CICP almost works in OpenSim, and Green Phosphor will provide the lsl code as it is so far... but there are problems with large graphs. Solve these problems and you get the use of the tools FOR LIFE (Ben wants a CICP in MRM). "Implement CICP in VastPark, Sirikata, etc... and you get to use our tools FOR LIFE. Contact me (arkowitz at gmail dot com) if you are seriously interested, and I will help you get going." says Ben, and continues "We're also selling a limited number of lifetime memberships to promote the new service. A one-time payment of $400 US will get you lifetime use of our subscription tools, within any virtual world supporting CICP."

Jani: what is the subscription service going to cost outside that limited offer?

Ben: it's going to be around $40 US per month.

Jani: who do you expect will use the service?

Ben: we have some consulting companies lined up to use the service; they work with their own data and their clients' data to improve business processes. They are psyched to be able to meet with their clients within the virtual world and look at data together. When you put data into the metaverse it is more powerful than a physical meeting could ever be! And it saves spending major money on travel. Another market we will be targeting is day traders and stock brokers. Imagine getting together with your day-trading buddies in a virtual space where your portfolio and the market can be visualized in real time. We're building the tools for this and will be looking for people to get involved in hooking them up to all sorts of data and configuring them for various domains.

Jani: is it too early for such serious business use of virtual worlds?

Ben: it's time to leave flatland. Data is at the core of everything a knowledge worker does, and is the root of good decision making. With billions of dollars spent on crappy business intelligence "dashboards", it's time for real data visualization to emerge as the centerpiece of a new, more intelligent decision-making process. More than a year ago I coined the term "data wizards" to describe people who will use virtual world skills and data skills such as Excel proficiency, SQL, and stats knowledge to facilitate more powerful work sessions within the metaverse. Data wizards show yourselves! We have some tools for you!

Jani: isn't there a steep learning curve to becoming a data wizard?

Ben: there is definitely a learning curve. But that is precisely why being a data wizard will be a lucrative occupation. Learning is free with the public version of our tools and with open source virtual worlds and Second Life sandboxes... and I and others at Green Phosphor are here to help. Anything we can do to help form a community of professionals who will provide metaverse data services to others, we will do.

Jani: what would you call such a community of data wizards?

Ben: perhaps the "Graphor's Guild" would be a good name. I want Green Phosphor to provide tools to a community of professionals who help eachother master their skills, and who help their clients gain new insight from data.

Article tagged: glasshouse

11 comment(s) for “Glasshouse Virtual World Data Graphs are now updated in Real Time”

	Erica Driver said on Thursday, July 02, 2009 (3:26:16 PM) Now this is a topic near and dear to my heart: collaborative 3D data visualization. The potential business value of 3D dashboards and situation rooms is enormous. I'm following this use of immersive technology closely, as it will be one of the key growth areas during the next couple of years. I like the idea of a graphor's guild, though I'm not sold on the term "data wizard." The term "data wizard" makes it seem like only a few specialists will be able to participate. In contrast, I see immersive technology as democratizing the process of graphical data representation.
	Ben Lindquist said on Thursday, July 02, 2009 (3:49:34 PM) Erica I agree that immersive technology should make data representation more open. I think that in order to get there we will need facilitators, though. And I think these facilitators already exist... every company has Excel experts who set up spreadsheets others use; report writers who can pull the numbers people need faster than anyone else; SAS experts who can whip up an analysis for executives to use in making a decision... I believe these people are already the "data wizards" (I'm open to other names) and our goal should be to get them into the immersive space with the people who rely on the numbers they produce... so that teamwork and communication are enhanced. I also think that immersive data visualization technology can be set up to let everyone in an organization explore the organization's database, easily; this will have great benefit but needs to be facilitated by the data wizards. Somebody has to hook it up so everyone can use it.
	Erica Driver said on Thursday, July 02, 2009 (5:05:09 PM) Ah, I see what you mean Ben about the data wizard. Maybe the old name was "data analyst" or something like that. Now that I understand what you mean, I think "data wizard" is a well-suited term for it. This conversation is making me think about something else that's been on my mind: where are the traditional BI vendors? Is the collaborative 3D data visualization market going to evolve completely separately from the traditional BI market? I am not familiar with the traditional BI vendors, the way I am with the traditional enterprise collaboration platform vendors, so maybe I'm just outside the sphere.... but I'm not hearing any rumblings from that corner of the enterprise software market.
	Jeff Lowe said on Thursday, July 02, 2009 (6:09:05 PM) Fascinating stuff. Perhaps Data Maestros or Data Immersionists (orchestrate the data visualization symphonies, or baptize them with data). Are the in-world visualization options limited to those displays you develop, or is there an API of sorts allowing developers to create their own visualization displays for your imported data?
	Ben Lindquist said on Friday, July 03, 2009 (10:16:18 AM) Our next big development push will be to create a scripting language and/or API to do exactly what you suggest, Jeff. This will allow people to easily create new visualization styles, including munging of the data if necessary, and then share them with other users. Glasshouse will become a framework providing the user with a data querying layer, data manipulation routines including statistical analysis, and secure connectivity to multiple virtual worlds. We want to let our users be the creators of visual metaphors rather than limiting them to what we come up with.
	Ben Lindquist said on Friday, July 03, 2009 (10:52:47 AM) Erica my plan has been to catch the traditional BI vendors with their heads up their dashboards, lulz.
	Peter Miller said on Saturday, July 04, 2009 (5:11:34 AM) Erica might want to check out http://sldataviz.pbwiki.com/FrontPage for more of this kind of thing.
	Steve Nelson said on Saturday, July 04, 2009 (12:43:25 PM) Cool - kind of like this that Leon Atkinson did a couple years ago: http://clearnightsky.com/node/278 which is still running on Clear Ink Island in Second Life. I'm glad to see Ben continuing to push the envelope and create these visualization tools. They're one of the first things that come to mind when people question the value of a virtual world for meeting, collaboration, education.
	Ben Lindquist said on Sunday, July 05, 2009 (6:43:20 PM) Leon's work was groundbreaking, and a great example of virtual world data visualization. While the resulting visualization is very similar to some of the visualizations Green Phosphor can produce, the backend is very different. We have focused on building an application which lives outside of the virtual world (thereby achieving cross-platform capability) and allows data from any SQL or Excel source to be visualized via simple configuration. All of the data visualization examples I post are produced by the same tool, with zero lsl or other coding - just configuration. This is why it is a tool rather than a specialized one-off example of data visualization.
	Rudy Jacob said on Friday, July 10, 2009 (3:43:30 AM) Definitely a step forward in data visualization. Two questions: - Seeing the interactivity in virtual worlds, would it be possible at some point to do "updates" to the data, and send SQL back to the database? - How would you deal with privacy on the 3D-graphs? For instance, on a website, you can login and only see the graphs yourself. I understand the benefit in virtual worlds where you can look at the data with more than one person and discuss it. However, you want to limit this group of persons with certain access rights to these graphs. Or would you say that this is "responsibility" of the framework of the virtual world?
	Ben Lindquist said on Friday, July 10, 2009 (12:43:12 PM) Answers: - yes it would be possible to do updates to the data, from the virtual world. We had a prototype which had the user enter a SQL statement with some extensions into Second Life chat, and the statement was executed and the resulting graph put into the world. We will be releasing a version of Glasshouse in a few months which uses a live instance of Excel; you'll be able to change the height of bars in the graph, which will change the corresponding cell in the Excel sheet, which will cause Excel to recalculate everything else, which will then be reflected immediately in the graph in the virtual world. - privacy is an important concern in virtual worlds (in some more than others...). While our secure service makes sure that only YOU or people whom you give a key to (or an object with the key embedded) can rez out YOUR graphs, it is absolutely true that if you do not have adequate control over the virtual space in which you rez the graph, others will be able to see it and possibly interact with it as well. The responsibility for security in this case belongs to both the virtual world framework and the user.

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