Towards the Holodeck: Fully Immersive Virtual Reality Visualisation of Scientific and Engineering Data

TL;DR

This paper presents an immersive VR environment for visualizing scientific and engineering data, utilizing consumer VR headsets and motion capture, with two case studies demonstrating different rendering engines.

Contribution

It introduces a VR visualization system tailored for scientific data, comparing custom and commercial render engines in practical case studies.

Findings

Custom engine offers tailored visualization capabilities.

Commercial game engine provides flexibility and ease of use.

Both approaches are effective for scientific data visualization.

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the development and operating principles of an immersive virtual reality (VR) visualisation environment that is designed around the use of consumer VR headsets in an existing wide area motion capture suite. We present two case studies in the application areas of visualisation of scientific and engineering data. Each of these case studies utilise a different render engine, namely a custom engine for one case and a commercial game engine for the other. The advantages and appropriateness of each approach are discussed along with suggestions for future work.