Immersive Virtual Reality for Scientific Visualization: A Progress Report
Andries van Dam · IEEE Virtual Reality Conference · 2000
Immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) is still in an early stage of development, due to significant deficiencies on many fronts, including input and output hardware performance and ergonomics, interaction techniques, application software, development environments, cost, and reliability. There are areas, such as vehicle simulation and walkthroughs of buildings and processing plants, in which IVR has clearly demonstrated its utility, and even its cost-effectiveness. However, the promise of IVR for scientific visualization has scarcely been realized, although there is anecdotal evidence thus far that immersion can help in scientific (or information) visualization. Can we show conclusively that there are visualization tasks for which being immersed in one's data/model provides extra or faster insight? I remain optimistic that in this area, too, we will be able to show that IVR has significant, measurable advantages over non-immersive environments. To illustrate, I will present some scientific visualization interaction research in our four-wall IVR system.