I was coasting through the innards of a giant, $25 million turbine recently, watching the massive blades turning just an arm's reach away. I was not only surrounded by data, but also was actually experiencing it in another dimension - the three-dimensional, visual one. I kept expecting The Twilight Zone's Rod Serling to show up and intone a few observations.
This compelling demo took place at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria, which uses 3-D visualization and virtual reality techniques to give skeptical business executives an up-close-and-personal look at exactly what their millions are buying from a local turbine manufacturer.
On the other side of the Atlantic, I checked out a slew of other business applications at Silicon Graphics's Reality Center for advanced visualisation. I watched virtual cars crash into one another in stress tests that found structural weaknesses that might otherwise go undetected. I flew over and under bridges to compare architectural options, and I got seriously nauseated from a spin in a virtual race car.
What all of that dabbling with 3-D visualisation tools woke me up to was the sleeper technology of the coming decade. It enables the use of our most accessible tools for observation and processing - our eyes and our brains - to pull understanding and insight from an impossibly large morass of data.
All the stars seem to be aligned for this one-time niche technology to break into the mainstream. Chips keep accelerating in power and speed, and visualisation software is rapidly descending into affordable PC price spaces. Database and enterprise resource planning vendors are stampeding to spatial data capabilities. Lucent Technologies recently launched a business that will market data-visualisation software for data mining and decision-support. The final frontier is the Web, where the brisk adoption of Virtual Reality Modeling Language as the standard way to deliver 3-D content has been surprisingly conflict-free.
My bet is that once the Net masses experience a few good 3-D visions, there'll be no turning back. I know I'll never look at turbines in quite the same way again.
