GeoFlow takes data for a 3-D drive

April 12, 2013 in Technology / Software
GeoFlow visualization of global city population.


With exploration that turns rows and columns of spatiotemporal data into rich 3-D maps, the term "add-in" really doesn't do justice to the technology behind GeoFlow, a preview of which is available for download. Take a look under the hood, and you'll see stars. That's because the research that led to GeoFlow began with Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope (WWT) research project, which visualizes terabytes of imagery and data from the astronomy community. Launched in 2008, the WorldWide Telescope application always was meant to be more than a tool that gives young astronomers an observatory in a PC. It enabled seamless panning and zooming through the universe, connecting them with stories and images from multiple sources over the Internet to deliver an immersive experience.


"With the dramatic growth in geospatial and temporal data," Wong says, "we wanted to explore new tools that could help us understand the large-scale temporal and geospatial trends that affect businesses. The goal always has been to bring dynamic, interactive data visualization to the business world. Yes, we built a gigantic , but to do so, we had to build an engine that could visualize the universe. If we can visualize the universe, we can visualize almost anything else."

The notion behind WWT was the ability to drive a virtual camera into the visualization space, give the user control over space and time, and create 'movies' with narratives that tell a story about the data that could be shared with others to communicate insight.


GeoFlow visualization of U.S. power stations.

"WWT enabled people to create guided tours of the universe by driving a virtual camera though the solar system for sharing with others. WWT has many guided tours done by astronomers, astrophysicists, educators, and even kids. These guided tours are interactive at any time, enabling full exploration 'to stop and look around' anytime you want to pause the tour."


"Microsoft Research did a great job pioneering 3-D visualizations," Ruble says. "The work they did with WorldWide Telescope showed real business applicability. Not only did the project help illustrate the value and real future potential of 3-D visualization, it significantly reduced our risk in productizing the capability."

That took awhile to build a full head of steam.

"We started out with a very small team," Wong recalls. "Then, in June of 2011, we got the green light to go into product development, and from there on, it grew slightly bigger, with a product manager from Office, as well as developers and designers from the Startup Business Group and a lot of hard work. There was work to define functionality more clearly and to ensure that the user experience would be in line with the rest of Office and Excel."


"We'd figure out how to do things," Wong recalls, "and then we would show that to the product-development team and say: 'Here's how specific functionality works. Here's what it's supposed to do.' We showed them what was possible—for example, how to create a tour. That helped the development team design the product specs to understand the range of functionality needed in each feature. But don't think that made their jobs easy, because the process of building a real product is N times more complicated than a research prototype, because of all the edge cases."



"Thank you for providing us access to the GeoFlow software," the user wrote. "We just completed a demonstration of the technology to a utility, overlaying household energy-consumption projections on top of household information. The spatial presentation of this data was a huge success. We and the customer are looking forward to the formal release of this software!"

More information: Public preview of project codename "GeoFlow" for Excel delivers 3D data visualization and storytelling

Dallas Utilities: Electricity seasonal use simulation using project codename "GeoFlow" Preview and Power View

Provided by Microsoft

"GeoFlow takes data for a 3-D drive" April 12, 2013 https://phys.org/news/2013-04-geoflow-d.html