Methods for Visual Mining of Data in Virtual Reality

Recent advances in technology have made it possible to use 3-D Virtual Reality for Visual Data Mining. This paper presents a modular system architecture with a series of tools for explorative analysis of large data sets in Virtual Reality. A 3-D Scatter Plot tool is extended to become an ”Object Property Space”, where data records are visualized as objects with as many statistical variables as possible represented as object properties like shape, color, etc. A working hypothesis is that the free and real-time navigation of the observer in the immersive virtual space will support the chances of finding interesting data structures and relationships. The system is now ready to be used for experiments to validate the hypothesis.