Virtual Reality-Based Interactive Scientific Visualization Environments

Abstract

Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) has some production applications (e.g., in vehicle design and psychiatric treatment), but it is often viewed as an expensive, over-hyped technology with insufficient and/or unproven benefit over conventional desktop systems. With steady research progress at many institutions and advances in hardware and software technologies, immersive scientific visualization is a third application area in which IVR is having a positive impact and is beginning to attract more attention from the scientific community. At Brown University, we have been researching immersive scientific visualization systems by developing interactive systems with domain scientists in a variety of fields, including archaeology, biology, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and geoscience. Anecdotal and formal evaluations show the benefits range from mild to very significant -benefits include speeding up and providing broader analysis, greater spatial understanding, enabling new types of exploration, helping in undergraduate as well as graduate courses, and debugging data acquisition methods. In this chapter, we present a number of these systems developed at Brown University and discuss the results of our experimental findings on the efficacy of IVR-based interactive visualization.Keywords Immersive virtual reality , Scientific visualization , Interactive visualization , 3D interfaces , Surround screen display , Virtual environments. IntroductionScientists studying the physical world frequently need to analyze complex data sets (multidimensional, multivariate, time-varying) and models. Our group of interactive visualization researchers subscribes to the theory that in order to best understand such data we must "impedance match" display and interaction devices as best we can with human motor and sensory capabilities, in a task-dependent way. We feel E.

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

“…Notwithstanding its great potential, one of the reasons why it has been only marginally adopted so far is the requirement of special, and often costly, hardware and/or software (see [117]). Another often-heard criticism is the lack of tools for specialized visualization, or of an established framework to build such applications on top of it [118].…”

A multimodal virtual reality interface for 3D interaction with VTK

“…Multimodal interfaces, however, have been applied for visualization applications before, e.g. [11,12,21]. They all combine gestures with speech to navigate through the environment or to manipulate the virtual objects.…”

“…In what way can other input modalities, such as speech and gestures be used? In addition to controlling a widget with one specific input modality, it can be beneficial to combine modalities [12]: Two or more input modalities can be combined to define one action, different input modalities can be used concurrently to execute concurrent actions, and one input modality can be used to enable/disable one of the other modalities.…”

Virtual Reality and Oceanography: Overview, Applications, and Perspective

“…At the Brown University Center for Computation and Visualization (CCV), over two decades of interdisciplinary visualization collaborations paved the way for state-of-the-art scientific VR applications today. While VR visualization takes varying degrees of effort to achieve, the benefits of visualizing scientific data in VR include faster analysis, greater spatial understanding, and new types of exploration (LaViola et al, 2009). Interest in developing VR applications has intensified recently with the development of cost-effective consumer grade head-mounted displays (HMD), which have made the benefits of interactive VR-based scientific visualization more widely accessible (Castelvecchi, 2016;Matthews, 2018).…”