Data Visualization Of Product Relations

Sammanfattning: Thanks to the rapid development in areas such as artificial intelligence companies now have the possibility to collect and analyze data to improve their business. These algorithms quickly result in large volumes of data, which are to be processed and understood by humans. The stakeholder for this project, IKEA, cannot keep track of all data relations in their sales patterns by using regular tables or graphs. Data visualization has always been a great tool to understand and communicate data. The purpose of data visualization is to convert slow reasoning tasks into into fast perception tasks. The hypothesis of this project is that the third dimension available in Virtual Reality (VR) can simplify this for big data. We have created a VR application to visualize product relations within the product range at IKEA. The application combines known research in data visualization, such as visual encodings and gestalt principles, with the advantages of 3D visualization and VR. Our conclusion is that the VR application provides a great overview of big data, and that tasks such as finding data relations in a big data set are greatly simplified. The testing sessions with the end users at IKEA confirms this. Furthermore, they believe that the application is a great tool for discovering patterns and relations within the data that was not possible before, and that it can be used to present research findings in an intuitive way.