Rapid development of scientific virtual reality applications

Abstract

Visualizing and working with large scale scientific image data can benefit greatly from advances in consumer Virtual Reality and game development tools, but presently only limited applications have leveraged these. We present a set of techniques for mapping scientific images and data manipulation tasks into virtual reality applications with an emphasis on short development time and high quality user experience. Existing techniques often require large teams to develop applications that suffer in quality or require extensive development time. Using off the shelf Virtual Reality hardware and freely available development tools we present a set of techniques for making immersive and interactive data visualization and manipulation applications. We demonstrate these techniques with a series of Virtual Reality apps to produce high quality immersive applications in incredibly short periods of time. These applications show large datasets and extracted high level information geared towards image understanding. We illustrate that these techniques can be integrated into existing data acquisition, image processing and machine learning work flows. With these techniques we hope to encourage future development of scientific applications for emerging Virtual Reality platforms.