We present News in Time and Space (NiTS), a virtual reality application for visualization, filtering and interaction with geo-based events based on GDELT. The application can be used via VR glasses as well as a desktop solution for collaborative use by multiple users using Ubiq. The aim of NiTS is to provide a broad overview of global events and trends over time, creating a valuable resource for users seeking to understand and analyze world events.

After you have cloned the project, you need to complete the configurations below:

For MongoDB configuration, you need to customize the MongoDBConfig.cfg file in the server folder with your credentials. Example:

remote_host = databasehost
remote_database = databasename
remote_user = databaseuser
remote_password = secret
remote_port = 27017

Our Application is relying on the DB to provide translations for CAMEO codes. To import use following command:

mongoimport -c CameoCodes -d %remot_database% --mode upsert --file ./server/EventCameoCodes.json --jsonArray

To Start the Server with Docker, run the following commands:

cd server
docker-compose up -d

The base server URL can be changed inside the 'ServerURL' gameobject inspector.

After the server is running, new data is imported from gdelt every 15 minutes. If you want to import data from a specific time period, you can do so by querying the server with the following URL: http://%SERVER_IP%/update/%DATE%. The date has to be in the format YYYY-MM-DD.

If you want to use the project please quote this as follows:

Julian Gagel, Jasper Hustedt, Timo Lüttig, Theresa Berg, Giuseppe Abrami and Alexander Mehler. (2023). "News in Time and Space: Global Event Exploration in Virtual Reality." Proceedings of the 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media.

Our globe is based on Sebastian Lagues game: https://github.com/SebLague/Geographical-Adventures

@inproceedings{Gagel:et:al:2023,
  author    = {Gagel, Julian and Hustedt, Jasper and L\"{u}ttig, Timo and Berg, Theresa
               and Abrami, Giuseppe and Mehler, Alexander},
  title     = {News in Time and Space: Global Event Exploration in Virtual Reality},
  year      = {2023},
  isbn      = {9798400702327},
  publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
  address   = {New York, NY, USA},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3603163.3609080},
  doi       = {10.1145/3603163.3609080},
  abstract  = {We present News in Time and Space (NiTS), a virtual reality application
               for visualization, filtering and interaction with geo-referenced
               events based on GDELT. It can be used both via VR glasses and
               as a desktop solution for shared use by multiple users with Ubiq.
               The aim of NiTS is to provide overviews of global events and trends
               in order to create a resource for their monitoring and analysis.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 34th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media},
  articleno = {7},
  numpages  = {3},
  location  = {Rome, Italy},
  series    = {HT '23},
  pdf       = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3603163.3609080}
}