Using 3D Printing to Visualize Social Media Big Data
This addresses visualization difficulties for users handling large, heterogeneous data from sources like social media, though it appears incremental as it applies existing 3D printing to a new data context.
The paper tackles the challenge of visualizing unstructured big data from social media by using 3D printing to create physical mockups, demonstrating this with Twitter data on an MIT campus model called LuminoCity.
Big data volume continues to grow at unprecedented rates. One of the key features that makes big data valuable is the promise to find unknown patterns or correlations that may be able to improve the quality of processes or systems. Unfortunately, with the exponential growth in data, users often have difficulty in visualizing the often-unstructured, non-homogeneous data coming from a variety of sources. The recent growth in popularity of 3D printing has ushered in a revolutionary way to interact with big data. Using a 3D printed mockup up a physical or notional environment, one can display data on the mockup to show real-time data patterns. In this poster and demonstration, we describe the process of 3D printing and demonstrate an application of displaying Twitter data on a 3D mockup of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) campus, known as LuminoCity.