Analysis of Astronomical Data using VR: the Gaia Catalog in 3D

Since 2016, the ESAC Science Data Center have been working on a number of Virtual Reality projects to visualize Gaia data in 3D. The Gaia mission is providing unprecedented astrometric measurements of more than 1 billion stars. Using these measurements, we can estimate the distance to these stars and therefore project their 3D positions in the Galaxy. A new application to analyze Gaia DR2 data is currently in development and planned to be publicly released soon. In this presentation we will give a demo of the latest version of the Oculus Rift application and will show specific use cases to analyze Gaia DR2 data as well as a demonstration on how Virtual Reality can be integrated into a data analysis workflow. We will also show how can new input techniques such as hand-tracking can bring new levels of freedom in how we interact with data.