Virtual Exploration through a Philosophical Tool

Abstract

As the era of big data emerges with digitalized devices, innovative data storage systems, and instant access to data, big data analysis technology has become a ubiquitous tool in our life opening up possibilities to resolve problems in various industries, services, and disciplines and experience our existence richly. However, in the era of big data, as technology evolves rapidly and becomes complicated and sophisticated to deal with big data, technology has been difficult for humans to understand and utilize it to analyze, interpret, and interact with data. This imbalanced phase between development of technology and the alienation of humans from technology is shrinking the possibilities rather than expanding. To reconcile technology and data with humans and transform technology into a mediator, this research presents a) a philosophical framework that mediates between technology, humans, and data in the form of an interactive exploration pipeline, b) a self-explanatory virtual reality (VR) application system, and c) an immersive human-centered VR environment for problem-solving and cognitive tasks. To discover, identify, and provide new possibilities of applying the philosophical framework to human-computer interaction, we conduct exploratory evaluations on the VR environment. Built upon reflections on the evaluation results, this thesis ends with a remark of a potential impact of this thesis on future exploration in VR research.