As far as data visualization in virtual reality goes, the New York Times’ Cascade system is one of the best examples I could think of. There’s a video on their site that provides a good overview – in short, the system tracks and models the spread of NYT articles as they’re shared across social media and other sites. or popular articles, this creates an immense amount of data. At the NYT R&D lab, this project exists on a multi-screen TV wall, perhaps the only way to effectively analyze all of its data at once. While not strictly virtual reality, I feel that big data tools like this one are perfect for VR environments; the large screen size and high resolution that VR offers is the best way to present this much data at once.

Also on the NYT labs site, there are more interesting projects, like an augmented-reality mirror. Projects like this are simple enough that I wouldn’t be surprised to see them become commonplace within the next few years.