6/2020 - 7/2020
Aion
Engine/Software
Languages
Roles
Notable Features Worked On
: Unity 3D
: C#
: Programmer
: Data Parsing, API, Time Control System, Orbs Systems
About
Aion is a VR interactive exhibition created as part of the final project of CreaTe to create a data visualisation experience about COVID-19. Aion presents to the user a visualisation of the most important trendwords used in Twitter over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. Aion is created by scrubbing Twitter of popular trendwords related to COVID-19 and visualising it to the user. These trendwords are categorised into several topics, such as Economy, Health, Politics, and Social, and visualised as balls around the user which can be clicked on. Once clicked, smaller orbs appear around it displaying the specific trendwords used, with the size of these orbs indicating how often they were mentioned. Story narratives about significant events that occurred during the pandemic can also appear, and clicking on it will allow you to explore more about what happened on that specific day.
To find out more about Aion, watch the video below!
Data Parsing
I was responsible for loading up the databases provided to me and creating the logic and behaviour of the entire program, such as the time controls and functionalities of the orbs. Since I would not have been working on any of the VR interactions, I had to create an API where my teammates could easily use the required functions and get the required data. Each database was a category by itself, and included information such as the Word, the number of times it was mentioned, and the Date of its record.
The databases were read as a CSV file from the Resources folder, and I had to extract the date and number of mentions and parse them into a data structure according to its category. Since the database was extremely large (thousands of entries per category), I also needed a data structure that could quickly retrieve entries, and a Dictionary was the ideal data structure to use. The data was then stored in the program as a Dictionary with key Category type, and value with another Dictionary of key DateTime and value int (number of mentions). This allowed the data to be neatly sorted and easily retrievable based on the required parameters.
From this data gathered, I can also automatically retrieve the start and end days, and therefore the number of days in the visualisation, instead of hardcoding it. I can also easily retrieve the actual DateTime from the day number and vice versa with this.
All these data is then fed into a Singleton (sorry I won't do it again) OrbManager that then instantiates all the required orbs. The relevant data is then fed into each orb such as what category they are and if there are any storypoints related to that word at a specific date.