Despite not being a very “designer” type of person, I’ve always been amazed at the concept of data visualization.
The ability to take a seemingly jumbled mess of data and present it in a format that is visually comprehensible to humans as well as informative is a thing I’ve been wanting to do for a while.
The general idea I had in mind was to create a visualization tool that allows for fetching of data from different kinds of sources. In order to achieve this I’ll probably implement a web service of some sort to send and receive data, as well as a parser. At the time of writing this, I have pretty much no idea how resource intensive this could potentially be with larger data sets and streams, but I’ll try to hold back the tears of agony when/if that time comes.
Thus far I’ve written a simple script that takes an input, currently an integer ranging from 1 to 10, and creates cubes (hereby named datablocks for maximum confusion) of varying size.
Truly incredible. The next step was to create some sort of visual connection between the data. For starters I merely decided to draw a line between each neighboring element of increasing size, however, I quickly realized this would become a giant mess once there would be more than 20 different objects, let alone hundreds or thousands. Rather than facing this problem further down the line, I decided to create clusters of data based on date and time for now.
How well this format will work with different types of data I have no idea (as per usual) – but for a microcontroller sending sensordata it should work fine, which is what I’m planning to test this on anyway.
From a previous project in Unity i tried implementing a messaging-system like the soapstone from the dark souls series – so I decided to transfer the simple messaging server/client i wrote for that (a simple TCP client/server in .NET core that connects to unity and vice versa) and implement it here. Passing in a bunch of plain data with 3 different dates shows up as 3 spheres with data contained in each one, as shown.
Now the great part about writing posts like these is that I don’t have to show you the terrible implementations and edge cases that occur. Like spheres being miles apart if the dates are far apart, too much data making spheres too large so the contents become barely visible since they’re all lined up and the list goes on.
Once I’ve cleaned up some code/functionality, implemented the parser and gotten a better grasp on which direction i want to take this project I’ll post an update detailing the progress as well as the messaging service.