Born in Bradford Immersive Experience (BIBIE) is a VR art-science collaboration that combines state-of-art machine learning with VR, to allow researchers, policy makers and the general public to interact with complex multidimensional datasets to improve interpretability and scientific communication. 

The prototype experience uses state of the art data reduction techniques to render a 3 dimensional point cloud. Each point in the cloud is one of the 13,818 participants in the Born in Bradford project – a large longitudinal cohort study that examines the lives of people in the city.

The proximity of each point in the cloud is based on the similarity of each of the participants’ physiological, psychological, socio economic, genetic and environmental data collected at a point in time. Users inside the VR experience can explore multiple dimensions in the data though colour and discover patterns in the point cloud data.

Commissioned by the Centre for Immersive Technologies at the University of Leeds, the prototype delivered the first step towards an immersive data exploration, collection and simulation platform for a wide range of potential users.