Navigable videos for presenting scientific data on head-mounted displays

TL;DR

This paper introduces an accessible authoring and navigation system for immersive scientific data presentations on affordable head-mounted displays, enhancing spatial understanding and viewer engagement.

Contribution

It presents a novel, cost-effective tool and interface enabling scientists to create and navigate immersive 360-degree scientific visualizations.

Findings

Effective data feature highlighting with connected 360° video paths

Bidirectional video playback enhances user control

Positive usability feedback from case studies

Abstract

Immersive, stereoscopic viewing enables scientists to better analyze the spatial structures of visualized physical phenomena. However, their findings cannot be properly presented in traditional media, which lack these core attributes. Creating a presentation tool that captures this environment poses unique challenges, namely related to poor viewing accessibility. Immersive scientific renderings often require high-end equipment, which can be impractical to obtain. We address these challenges with our authoring tool and navigational interface, which is designed for affordable head-mounted displays. With the authoring tool, scientists can show salient data features as connected 360{\deg} video paths, resulting in a "choose-your-own-adventure" experience. Our navigational interface features bidirectional video playback for added viewing control when users traverse the tailor-made content. We evaluate our system's benefits by authoring case studies on several data sets and conducting a usability study on the navigational interface's design. In summary, our approach provides scientists an immersive medium to visually present their research to the intended audience--spanning from students to colleagues--on affordable virtual reality headsets.