Progress - Modes

Implemented Rotation and Zoom (having a bit of FOV problems)

Still working on Ray Casting to select specific points - unity colliders for particles is not too robust unfortunately... (The gray dot is a point that is selected)

 I tweaked the sliders so that the x axis dates show up on the graph controls and limits the data you are looking at - (still need to implement for Y and Z axis)

MODES

So the above just shows one stock over a year (price, volume) but I thought it would be interesting to look at a bunch of stocks (over the past 7 days) from NYSEAMEX and compare their different metrics to see if we can observe any trends. The metrics are:

- Company name/Stock Quote
-P/E ratio
- 52w price change (%)
- Float %
- Beta
- Average volume
- Net profit margin (%)
 - Sector: Basic Materials, Energy, Technology, Conglomerates etc...

Feature List

There are a couple of things in terms of the UI I am going to start working on.

Feature list

- Axes 

- Controls for pan and rotation

- rotation X, Y, Z

- scale X, Y, Z

- translation X, Y, Z

- mouse picking of coordinates

- Select

- Hover

- Navigation View

- Modifiying axes 

- Altering colors for the 4th dimension (grouping of data)

- Managing large data

- Real time data from S&P

- Just large data in general

- Limiting the amount of data you can see

UI Features

Adding UI features

Sketch

I implemented the slider controls which allows you to edit how much of the data you would like to see depending on the axis...

Creating Views (II)

I got the views to work through orthographic

Development with Views (I)

Initially I was normalizing the price and volume between 0 and 1. I found that presentation not very impressive and so I chnaged these axes to calculate the log10 of the volume and keep the original prices.

However the volume values were not too easy to differentiate - especially because they were pretty much in a similar range. Therefore I thought perhaps it makes sense to normalize this metric between 0 and 1 (or perhaps give an option).




I needed to make views for the axes (X vs Y and X vs Z) like the Unity editor has. I created 2 more cameras and adjusted them to try make a 2D image. I am not too happy with the XZ representation so amstill researching a better way to make views in unity.

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.