Evaluation of navigation operations in immersive microscopic visualization

Abstract

In this study, we evaluated the quantitative effectiveness of navigation operation in a virtual reality (VR) volumetric viewer, in order to confirm the effectiveness of VR in life sciences. The analytical work for biological data is a promising application of VR because users can manipulate 3D data intuitively in VR. However, few studies have focused on the quantitative evaluations of such applications. Therefore, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the speedup of navigation operation (sequences of translation, rotation, and scaling) in VR applications for 3D microscopy. We compared the task completion time between a non-VR visualization tool and a VR visualization tool. The speedup by the VR immersive visualizer was found to be 203% in the most effective case. The result showed that the VR immersive visualizer enables more efficient navigation than the conventional volumetric viewer.