College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University

Statistical creativity

Working with the C6 brings out the creative side of statistics' Di Cook.

When someone is asked to describe a statistician, most of us would tend to say that profession is typically very scholarly and extremely focused on their work.

Creativity would probably not be the first words out of our mouths.

That's the exact opposite of Di Cook, associate professor of statistics. And even she will readily admit that the public's stereotypical image of a statistician is not exactly how she would describe herself.

"Typically statisticians have some of the poorest visual skills of any profession," she said. "Our numerical skills are obviously much stronger than other professions.

"I would describe myself as a creative person."

She actually attended art school for a brief time in her native Australia after receiving a mathematics degree.

"It wasn't until I got to the United States that I discovered that statisticians were doing graphical work," she said.

Cook is able to pursue her creativity with the C6 virtual reality system located in Howe Hall. She first became interested in the device while attending a seminar conducted by Carolina Cruz-Neira, the builder of the C2 and C6 virtual reality systems at Iowa State.

C6 is a device for 360-degree immersion to display synthetic environments. The device is comprised of six stereoscopic screens, a three-dimensional sound system, and wireless technologies. Using this device, a user is able to navigate through and manipulate virtual worlds.

"I got very excited about this technology after attending the seminar," Cook said. "Although this type of technology has been around for decades, they have been mostly single user devices. The C2 and C6 allow multiple users to see the same 3D scene which is important for collaborative statistical data analysis."

Cook became so interested in virtual reality that she now has offices in both Snedecor Hall and Howe Hall.

"The office space in Howe makes it easier for me to collaborate with other individuals on work with the C6," Cook said.

Cook says there are several obvious uses of virtual reality systems in statistics.

"Virtual reality can make abstract statistical graphics more accessible to a broader audience," she said. "It provides a physical realism that we can't duplicate elsewhere.

"If we can display content realistically, but in the same domain have statistical graphics, a broader audience can interact and understand their data better. This will help connect statistical graphics to the evolving field of information visualization."

With several graduate students, including Manual Suarez, Cook has developed a statistical graphics package for the C6 called "VRGobi." VRGobi is based on workstation software called XGobi. It extends it into 3D by showing 3D scatterplots, providing tools to interact with the points and setting the scatterplot rotating in higher dimensions.

With Laura Arns, a graduate in computer science, Cook has found some advantages for detecting structure in data in VRGobi over XGobi.

Support for her research in this area includes a National Science Foundation grant to explore the use of virtual reality for statistical graphics and for examining massive amounts of data. She is also collaborating on a John Deere grant in the virtual reality system.

Cook feels C6 and its applications are just the beginning for research involving virtual reality.

"Virtual reality is clearly going to grow," she said. "It's the workstation of the future. However it's a difficult area to work in because everything is constantly changing.

"That's exciting, though," she continued. "It's what needs to happen if the field is going to grow. There is huge potential for other researchers in fields such as psychology, computer science, geography, geology and mathematics, to contribute to virtual reality research."