LumaPie wins $20,000 Big Data VR Challenge

Unreal Engine creator Epic Games and research charity Wellcome Trust have announced the winners of its Big Data VR Challenge.

Launched earlier this year, the contest tasks games developers with finding a way to better present vast amounts of data and analytics through both Unreal Engine and virtual reality.

The winning team was LumaPie – a joint effort by creative studio Masters of Pie and 3D software consultancy Lumacode – which took home the grand prize of $20,000.

Their project was based on ALSPAC’s Children of the 90s data and presented a VR visualisation of “the environment and genetic factors that have shaped the development of the lvies of more than 14,000 residents in the city of Bristol”.

You can find out more in the video below.

“We thank all of the developers and researchers who dedicated their time and expertise to this competition,” said Epic founder and CEO Tim Sweeney. “This combination of hard science with the type of 3D development normally seen in the video game world will hopefully inspire new ways for visualisation of data to evolve as VR becomes a part of our everyday life.”

Wellcome Trust’s creative partnerships manager Iain Dodgeon added: “LumaPie has delivered an interactive suimulation with tangible outputs that can be applied and adapted to other studies as well. The results of this challenge are what we were hoping for and so much more.”