Foundry VR | Devpost

Some types of data are spectacular in VR. Google Earth is a prime example, the ability to be anywhere instantly is incredible useful for a huge variety of purposes. Our specific implementation focused on data from Transport for Greater Manchester, we used Foundry workflows to transform the data into latitude and longitude data for us to ingest in Unity and display in VR.

The VR system shows a map of Manchester and highlights the location of accidents on the map. When you hover over the points you get extra information, like a description of the accident, and a rating of the severity.

The original plan included being able to go into Google Earth by pointing at the map. This has uses in a variety of cases:

Infrastructure teams can identify the intersections that cause accidents, redesigning roads to make them safer, and taking those insights to improve future road designs by considering designs that cause the least accidents / incidents. Further, they can see the specific layout of those intersections to see they have been implemented with proper safety measures, or if they need improvements such as pedestrian railings.
Emergency response teams can use google earth to get insights into an area surrounding an ongoing accident, utilising Foundry's live data capability.

Further to this, we have implemented the ability to submit information in VR that feeds back into Foundry. We used workbench to provide a taskflow that can receive instructions from the VR user to improve certain roads (all within the headset) construction teams can then submit this task as completed, and few the remaining tasks they need to do.

If we were to implement the project under the road improvement use case we would include more complex datasets as provided by the government (as a client) ideally this would include up to date information on road conditions, and satellite imagery of the road to improve the time resolution that google earth provides.

Ultimately though the project goes further than this. As we mentioned at the start, VR can provide incredible visualisations, especially for datasets where a 3 dimensional perspective is important. This could extend to car or plane aerodynamics or even disaster simulation like earthquake or wildfire data. The big data backing from Foundry combined with the power of VR has the potential to produce stunning, creative and deeply impactful data representations. We're very excited to have made it possible.