I've recently been involved in a data warehousing project, and of course I immediately thought how useful it would be to be able to represent vast volumes of data in an immersive 3D environment, to be able to walk through or fly over the data, to 'experience' it.  Two videos released this week demonstrate the ongoing efforts to do exactly that using environments such as Second Life.  The work from Green Phosphor below shows data from a spreadsheet be in displayed immediately in Second Life as a grid of 3D bars, dynamically updatable.

This is great, but only a first step.  I imagine the data being represented in a much bigger way that can be flown over or through.  But it's a great start.

The other is a video of the new ThinkBalm 'data garden'. 

This is an attempt to represent the results of their report on the business value of immersive environments in an immersive way again in Second Life.  I should say that I haven't had time to explore the data garden in Second Life itself yet, but I think the video highlights one problem with using video clips to demo these environments.  It's impossible to see the value of the immersive technology from the video.  Frankly I found myself heaving a huge sigh of relief each time the video zoomed in on the 2D graph - at least that made sense!  Many of the things in the garden seem to be using 3D for the sake of it without considering the value added.  So I love the idea, but the video just doesn't convince even me, a real 3D evangelist. I'll post more observations after I've visited the garden 'for real'.