In November, during the SharePoint Conference 2012, attendees received a Public Preview of project codename “GeoFlow” for Excel, the latest business-intelligence (BI) functionality to be integrated with Microsoft Excel 2013 later this year. As an Excel add-in, GeoFlow provides interactive, 3-D geospatial and temporal data visualizations. It enables information workers to discover and share new insights from data through rich, 3-D data on a globe and fluid, cinematic guided tours—virtual cinematography moving through data.
With dynamic data 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.
But even while Curtis Wong, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, was busy giving talks about WWT, he had further ambitions in mind for the technology.
“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 virtual telescope, 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.
Read more via Microsoft Research
