Want to build a VR network chart? Here’s a way to do it without coding

How the US searches for Senators

Making a virtual reality visual is traditionally a tricky thing, as we found out in building one around Brexit. It requires coding and developers and there are many rules about avoiding making people feel physically sick. That’s a barrier to use.

But recently, a new platform has made it a lot easier to visualise data as a non-coder. Flourish, built by Kiln, allows you to upload a visual and then re-use it again and again with new data, different text and different images. It was launched recently and you can find out more about it here.

As part of this launch, we have worked with Pitch Interactive to build new VR templates for Flourish which means you can make visuals that work either in VR or regular old 360-degrees without coding or being a developer and just by adding your data and changing some of the visual options.

TV show network chart in VR

We made some examples too: the visual above shows related Google searches for TV shows. Any journalist in a newsroom could use that template, but with different data. For example, the visual below shows searches for U.S. Senators before this year’s midterm elections. (And here’s the visual code on GitHub).

There’s also this lesson here on how to use Flourish – it’s only 7 minutes and will tell you everything you need to know. If you make something cool with it, let me know in the comments below.