Moving to Unity

OpenGL and Visual Studio can prove to be pretty cumbersome to work with so I finally made the switch to Unity with C#. I managed to generate some visualizations of the dell stock, more specifically date (x) ,price (y) , volume (z). 

The idea is to experiment with plotting the points and visualizing the data. I found unity tutorials that helped me learn C# and the way unity works.

1. Plot points

I first simply plotted each 3d point. I had to normalize each dimension between 0 and 1 since the values for volume could be as high as 1 million and as low as 0 while price changes are less drastic. 

However the points are a bit confusing to look at unless you look at the 2D perspectives in the lower frames. 

2. Plotting lines for volume

I had to so some sort of surface area and thought it would make sense to have a sort of bar chart for the volume dimension. The problem with this is the change in price is given less attention since the points are not connected. I also implemneted an object rotation with left/right arrow keys

3. Creating continuity

So I added the code the make the graphs look continuous. The problem I faced here was drawing the volume for points that were between 2 price points. I took the natural gradient but I am not too sure how much I like this. This is a true surface area but I think I need to think of better ways to show the 3 dimensions.

OpenGL trial

To understand how the data would look I created an OpenGL QT project. I parsed a Dell Stock file with Volume, Price, and Date. The image below shows how it looks.