DATAVIZ – BASHIBA – Immersive Experiences by Roberto Vitalini

Emotional Visual Atmospheres

Meta Meeting, April 20 2011

We started in 2008 to connect data streams (could be sound, financial data, EEG) to competing environmental forces that affect a real-time 3D scenery in subtle and often surprising ways. Trends and eventual problems appear as anomalies in the weather conditions or the surface of the sea. We call this approach BASHIBA Panorama, a real-time data viz solution that is instinctively legible and transits emotional sensations together with vital information.

"A cloud masses, the sky darkens, leaves twist upward, and we know that it will rain. We also know that after the storm, the runoff will feed into groundwater miles away, and the sky will grow clear by tomorrow. All of these events are distant in time and space, and yet they are all connected within the same pattern. Each has an influence on the rest, and influence that is usually hidden from view. You can only understand the system of a rainstorm by contemplating the whole, not any individual part of the pattern.
Businesses and other human endeavors are also systems. They, too, are bound by invisible fabrics of interrelated actions, which often take years to fully play out their effects on each other. Since we are part of that lacework ourselves, it's doubly hard to see the whole pattern of change. Instead we tend to focus on snapshots of isolated parts of the system, and wonder why our deepest problems never seem to get solved."
(Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline, 1990, p.10).

In business environments, we tend to double-check and re-read variables that in moments of crisis might be irrelevant. BASHIBA Panorama has been built as a natural visual complement so that you and your team can share a common picture of reality and openly discuss counter-measures. The result is a beautiful, developing scene in which observers (e.g. traders) can monitor several streams of background information using their peripheral vision.

BASHIBA offers companies the possibility to have virtual windows on a beautiful landscape that reacts in real-time to data changes:
- Perceive Trend Changes with your Peripheral Vision
- Reduce Cognitive Load
- Feel the Mood of Your Information Environment
- Increase Awareness and Responsiveness
- Avoid Paralysis by Analysis (information overload)

03-05 February 2010: BASHIBA Panorama at the Swiss Financial Trade Fair, Zürich, Switzerland.
Two virtual climates, the JB Energy Transition Fund against the MSCI World Index evolving side by side (historical playback).