Abstract
With the ongoing, exponential increase in ocean data from autonomous platforms, satellites, models, and in particular, the growing field of quantitative imaging, there arises a need for scalable and cost-efficient visualization tools to interpret these large volumes of data. With the recent proliferation of consumer grade head-mounted displays, the emerging field of virtual reality (VR) has demonstrated its benefit in numerous disciplines, ranging from medicine to archaeology. However, these benefits have not received as much attention in the ocean sciences. Here, we summarize some of the ways that virtual reality has been applied to this field. We highlight a few examples in which we (the authors) demonstrate the utility of VR as a tool for ocean scientists. For oceanic datasets that are well-suited for three-dimensional visualization, virtual reality has the potential to enhance the practice of ocean science.
Highlights
Virtual Reality (VR) allows a user to immerse herself in a computer generated environment
Computer-generated visualizations of four dimensional flows, such as geophysical models of ocean currents, yield the most complete picture of oceanic processes when visualized in four dimensions (Nations et al, 1996) and exploration of complex datasets using virtual reality (VR) can provide a method for quickly detecting patterns and unseen features (Billen et al, 2008)
In order to render the virtual scene, a PC with a high quality GPU is required, raising the cost of such a system by one to two thousand dollars. This limits its application as only a limited number of users can participate at the same time and applications are only usable by a smaller subset of people when compared to mobile phone VR
Summary
Virtual Reality (VR) allows a user to immerse herself in a computer generated environment. The feeling of presence (Slater and Wilbur, 1997) is therein generated by simulating sensory feedback of the environment in response to a user’s action. This allows a user to coexist and interact with virtual entities in the same three-dimensional space. Researchers from a range of scientific disciplines have benefited from the application of virtual reality. 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. VR Ocean displays (HMD), which have made the benefits of interactive VR-based scientific visualization more widely accessible (Castelvecchi, 2016; Matthews, 2018). We will conclude with a discussion of these applications including some outlook for future developments in this field
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