Summary

Visualising Academia is a proof-of-concept client project developed as part of the Games Research and Development Module. The client requested an application that can visualise data from various academic fields. It was developed in a group of 2. The system uses datasets retrieved from the free Constellate API to draw nodes, representing data within the set, and relations between them based on various traits.

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The backend parses data from formatted .CSV spreadsheets to create a list of all available articles. When the user enters a search query, the last matched article is used as the Origin to generate a network. In a network every article is checked against the Origin to find any relations, such as Publisher, Author Name or Publish Year. If a node matches it is placed into a sub-network of nodes based on the type of relation to ensure relations are grouped together instead of being positioned randomly. Nodes are all given a sphere collider to ensure no overlap occurs. Once the network is generated, the user is able to freely move about in 3D space and click on nodes.

What did I do?

I implemented a scalable system which can take data contained within formatted .CSV files and generate a pool of GameObjects with LineRenderers connecting those that match. I implemented an interface with several text fields the user can fill in to create a search query, which is used as the base of the network. During development I swapped the dataset of 70 entries to one with over 1000 entries and there were almost no issues with the transition.

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