MSc Managed


Photo of a bearded man, wearing full academic dress and a VR headset.

This is the final post in my MSc journey. Last month, in an academic congregation at Northumbria University, I was formally awarded a Master of Science Digital and Technology Specialist (Data & Analytics) with Distinction. Look! Actual proof! Thanks to Mike, my Father-in-Law, for ripping that stream. As my research was about "Exploring the visualisation […]

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Would you go to the Job Centre or DMV in the Metaverse?


A VR headset.

I'm just getting started with the Oculus Quest 2 from Facebook Meta. It is amazing. OK, that's a lie. It's a pretty good tech demo of what one vision of the future could look like. But it is making a little bit of my brain itch. What Government services0 could / should be run in […]

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Review: Meta Quest 2 - first impressions


A VR headset.

The Meta Quest 2 is almost amazing. It is a tantalising glimpse of a future which isn't quite here yet. I dislike Facebook's Meta's vision of the Metaverse - but the tech is undoubtedly fun when it works. I remember using VR way back in the 1990s. When on holiday, games arcades often had a […]

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Augmented Reality Twitter Conversations!


I've recently launched TweeView - a new way to visualise Twitter conversation threads in 2D and 3D. Sadly, I don't have a Virtual Reality system - feel free to buy me one! - but I have the next best thing. A web browser! Demo! Using the awesome power of A-Frame, here's a demo of how […]

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VR for Statistics


A basic bar chart - with four columns. The tallest is about the height of the screen.

I'm not a big fan of Virtual Reality. I find it claustrophobic and impractical for most uses. There are some areas which it does impress though. Scale. Half-a-dozen years ago - during one of VR's periodic hype-phases - an employer asked me and my team to "do something interesting" with all the expensive VR kit […]

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Charity Fundraising Using VR


Walking back from work yesterday, I noticed an unusual set of chuggers - those faux-cheerful folk who try to stop you in the street asking for money. They were fundraising for Unicef. Rather than handing out flyers they were carrying high-tech VR headsets! Using the headset, I was able to take a virtual tour of […]

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