CityAtmosphere: VR image to glimpse wishes in the air

This paper presents a novel virtual reality demonstration program that provides people immersive urban experience, i.e. helps people understand characteristics of the city atmosphere from big data analysis on GPS location logs and search query logs. In contrast to the other demonstration systems that show the characteristics of areas of interests by using tag cloud, or VR systems using 3D computer graphics, our system synthesizes both the functionalities by showing 3D point clouds, where each particle shows search queries made by people staying at the area of interests. This synthesis invokes people feel the atmosphere of the city while traditional VR systems could not offer it. To make demonstration system effective, a new feature extraction process on search query logs is proposed by focusing on the users who visit the area of interests. In the demonstration at the conference, visitors could enjoy immersive urban experience with VR headset. Furthermore, the paper also shows the empirical evaluation on our new feature representation from search query logs.