RTR develops visual analytics that communicate data analyses through the use of appropriate visual metaphor and accepted principles of reasoning and graphic representation. Our visual representations strive to facilitate the analytical reasoning process by creating software that maximizes decision makers and stakeholders’ capacity to perceive, understand, and reason about complex and dynamic data and situations.
From a purely analytic point of view, the value of RTR’s visualizations, either 2D or 3D, easily illustrate the data analyses and research and development efforts, which improves the effectiveness of communicating detailed analytical results and plays a critical role in interpreting the results. Since the systems that RTR normally models are quite complex (as many as 15,000 entities executing several hundred simultaneous processes), the most efficient way to gain a macro-level understanding of the modeled system is frequently a visual presentation of both the moving entities and the metrics of interest to the analyst.
Currently, within visual analytics, the sources for data representation and transformation are primarily within the areas of mathematics and statistics, modeling and simulation, and natural language processing (NLP).
RTR utilizes Unity 3D, a robust commercial game engine, that has been used to produce indie and commercial game titles. The visualization team can customize the Unity 3D engine, to allow for the importing of simulation files, exported from Pro-Model and interface with Border Facility Analysis and Modeling System (BFAMS). RTR also uses Autodesk’s 3D Studio Max 9 for modeling and texturing and produces 2D and 3D Graphical User Interface (GUI) animations movies for select projects.
Benefits of visualizations from a technical and business perspective are:
- Visualizations are much easier to comprehend than a presentation based upon tables of numbers and simple data graphs
- A subject-matter-expert can validate the model’s behavior to his/her knowledge of the system
- As a troubleshooting or debugging tool, visualizations are excellent at providing immediate feedback during development
- Data visualization provides a means of watching the changes occurring in a specific metric within a system
- Visualization shows correlation and causation