Immersive Health Data Visualization in Virtual Reality
Damaruka Priya Rajasagi · 2023
During the recent pandemic, critical decisions were taken by public healthcare officials by viewing and analyzing data. Doing so in an immersive environment like virtual reality (VR) would have provided more context and aided with engagement and better performance. As a solution to this problem, an interactive 3D virtual reality data visualization tool is being developed by a team of Unreal developers, public-health domain experts, and user experience (UX) researchers at the Imaging Research Center, UMBC. This research aims to understand the interaction mechanisms that a novice user from the public health domain might face when interacting with an immersive data visualization tool. The results show that public policy and emergency health services workers found it beneficial to interact and find relationships between data in an immersive VR environment and were able to offer design recommendations for a more effective and engaging experience.