You may have seen sophisticated 3-D representations of data on TV commercials. If you did, you probably thought this was some sort of futuristic dream that would never be implemented. Thanks to MindManager Pro 7 and the virtual world, Second Life, it may be closer than you think.

In Gaelen O’Connell’s Mindjet blog post, she notes that George Kurtz, whose avatar is, Butch Dae, faced the challenge of representing enormous amounts of data that he had aggregated from a number of virtual worlds. With a little help, he was able to transform the two-dimensional into the three-dimensional. Galen says,

Builder, Llanna Lane, helped George “bring his 2D Mindjet map into SL.” She then assisted George in developing “three representations of the mind map including an interesting 3D tubular display. The display lets avatars get the “big picture” and read node names in the static map using a 3D tube browsing tool. Avatars can actually fly around the information in the tubes”, quotes the author in the article from “The Seventh Sun.”

You really have to see it to believe it. In fact, if you haven’t tried mindmapping, you’ll find that it’s an extraordinarily valuable tool to help you conceptualize and organize data in two dimensions. You’ll probably also want to find out what Second Life is all about. Click here to go to Gaelen’s post.