‘Big Data VR Challenge’ $20,000 Grand Prize Winner Revealed by Epic Games and Wellcome Trust

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Epic Games and Wellcome Trust revealed at Develop:Brighton that the winner of the Big Data VR Challenge—claiming a grand prize of $20,000—is LumaPie.

LumaPie, a London based team made up of the creative studio Masters of Pie and 3D software consultancy firm Lumacode, was one of the six teams to compete in the fourth month-long challenge. The objective: to create a VR visualization to manipulate, and ultimately help demystify some of the correlations found in big data, often times with several decades worth of data points to account for.

“This combination of hard science with the type of 3D development normally seen in the video game world will hopefully inspire new ways for visualization of data to evolve as VR becomes a part of our everyday life,” said Epic Games Founder and CEO Tim Sweeney.

See Also: Epic’s Big Data VR Challenge Winner Will Take Home $20,000 Next Week at Develop: Brighton Conference

Working exclusively in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine 4, LumaPie used data from The University of Bristol’s ALSPAC Children of the 90s’, a multi-generational long-term study that followed the health of approximately 14,000 families in the Bristol area since the early ’90s.

“All the teams created solutions that address the hurdles of analyzing large data sets in new and ingenious ways,” said Mike Gamble, European Territory Manager, Epic Games. “LumaPie in particular have built a brilliant VR application that solves the challenge. They kicked it into the goal.”

Although there isn’t a public demo available yet, attendees at Develop:Brighton last week got the chance to see the project in action after it was unveiled as the grand prize winner. You can also see a quick preview of the team’s pre-submission UI in the video below.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.