Virtual Reality for Information Visualization Might Just Work This Time
Bruce Hunter Thomas · Frontiers in Robotics and AI · 2019
In the 1990's, Virtual Reality (VR) was discredited as a means of presenting Information Visualization (InfoViz). Mercurio and Erickon (Mercurio et al., 1990), noted several problems required to be overcome before the potential of VR for scientific visualization could be realized: low image resolution, user navigation, small tracking volume, low tracker update rate, and poor user interfaces. Even with this negative reaction, a number of researchers continued pursuing this line of investigation (for example, the work of Bowman et al., 2003). As hardware and graphics techniques improved, plausible applicability of VR to InfoViz was slowly being realized. Currently, Immersive Analytics (Marriott et al., 2018) is an emerging direction for the use of VR and other immersive technologies to improve understanding of visualization problems.