Today we’re excited to announce MetaLayer’s support and partnership with Rick Smolan for the launch of the The Human Face of Big Data project. In addition to data analysis and visualization, we also collaborated with Rick’s team to launch an app that’s on display here at the launch in New York.

With this HFOBD app, users can visually explore the large amounts of data being collected by an iPhone app released earlier this year.

How does it work?  Well as with all of our products, exploring data is a drag and drop experience. At the top users have several data sets that they can drop on the canvas below. Instantly the data populates and gives the user a visual representation.  As users add new data sets, they can use those to filter the previously existing data.  

For instance the people who answered the question “Do you feel life has been fair to you?” as ‘No’ tended to be female.  Overlaying even more data, about whether or not those females were religious yielded even more of a contrast.  The conclusion, then, might be made that the females sample in this data set are more likely to somehow feel short changed by ‘life’ the more religious they are.

Another analysis seemed to indicate that the more multi-lingual the audience, the more likely users are to consume news via mobile platforms.

This app is still closed to people outside of the launch event, but we’ll be working with Rick to release it soon!