Presence and performance within virtual environments
Virtual environments and advanced interface design
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Our ability to extract data from nature by far exceeds our ability to analyze let alone understand it. For good reasons this has been dubbed the data deluge [1, 2]. A standard solution is to develop computational systems that automate the analysis and storage of data in large-scale infrastructure initiatives [3]. The complexity of these petascale computational systems will practically follow that of the data they are build to analyze. On one hand, this trend in science to collect data because it is technology possible as opposed to being theoretically needed, has given rise to agnosticism towards the sources of data. Rather, the believe is that out of the accumulated mass of data, combined with an exact reconstruction of "reality" based on this data in some way knowledge and understanding will flow [4]. This leads to a science as a mechanical archival activity, where researchers accumulate data because it is possible as opposed to being contingent upon predictions and hypotheses. Borges captures the end of understanding that this entails well in his short story "On Exactitude in Science": "...and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it." [5]. This raises the fundamental question of how humans can reclaim the territory from the map and can stem the data deluge. One pragmatic and epistemologically sound approach would be to stop the mad dash for data and return to a hypothesis driven form of science. The second approach is to find new ways to interface human users to complex datasets and the systems that generate and analyze them in order to advance understanding of the sources of data.