Big Data VR app allows researchers to 'browse' genomes

Earlier this year, Epic Games (the folks that made the Unreal Engine) held a $20,000 competition that challenged VR companies to create programs that could help users better tackle the valuable, albeit unwieldy, figures in Big Data sets. For its entry into "The Big Data VR Challenge" Hammerhead VR submitted The Genome Browser, a virtualization that will allow researchers to, quite literally, browse through an organism's genome and access a library of data (generated by the Wellcome Sanger Institute) at each gene.

With it, Hammerhead hopes to empower researchers with the ability to quickly scan through enormous amounts of data and find new correlations between these data points. Doing so could accelerate the development of new drugs and treatments for a wide variety of diseases. And while the Hammerhead team did not win the competition, you can see the VR system in action with this newly-released 3D video, below.