These are exciting times. Gaming and VR technologies are rapidly intersecting with complex real-world applications. We are lucky to be coding in these exciting times. This video is an early prototype illustrating scaling cyberspace graph representations using Unity 3D, visualizing approximately 22,000 nodes and edges. In this example we can “warp” from network cluster to network cluster and we can “fly’ up and down, left and right, forwards and backwards, illustrating how to travel in cyberspace. This is a very rough demonstration using random data; however, Richard Zuech and I are working on large datasets and much better visualizations of these datasets in 3D and VR.
We have been discussing a 3D force-directed graph in VR for cyberspace situational awareness for a long time now (as far back as 1999); and the 2016 release of the HTC Vive and advances in GPUs for VR, etc. make this all possible. 2017 should be really fun!
In 2016 I wrote thousands of lines of back-end code to fuse software sensor data into graphs of enriched objects, processed as arrays, and serialized as JSON files. I assume by now you might have browsed this blog and are up to speed on our research experiments and cyber SA goals.
Zach’s HTC Vive demo was inspiring because his VR work with HTC Vive and Unity 3D is very artistic and beautiful. As you may know, it’s fairly easy to write or port force directed graph code to C# and create graphs in Unity 3D and other development platforms. We have FDG code for C# and Javascript from the net and have moved from D3.js and 2D web based simulations to 3D and gaming engines. Zach’s well designed FDG demo helped us decide to focus on the HTC Vive and Unity 3D as our initial gaming engine and so we dropped Unreal development for now.
Would be great to find coders to collaborate with us. Rich and I are self-funded because we believe very strongly in our goals and are very passionate about our work. We are currently starting to build more complex cyberspace representations with Unity 3D; and we continue to build out back-end code in PHP to extract sensor data and fuse this data together in graphs of enriched cyber-objects.
Force-directed graphs, like the example in this video, are cool, but we also like 3D radial clusters, depending on the applications, it’s good to morph back and forth.
Happy New Year 2017!
