Simulating projective Augmented Reality Visualizations in Virtual Reality: Is VR a feasible Environment for medical AR Evaluations?

Abstract

Augmented Reality (AR) has demonstrated potential in medical applications, such as enhancing surgical navigation. However, evaluating medical AR visualizations entails high costs and effort to provide suitable hardware solutions. This is particularly crucial in projective AR, as these systems require several error-prone calibration and registration steps. This work investigates the suitability of Virtual Reality (VR) as a cost-effective and controlled study environment for evaluating projective AR visualizations. A virtual twin of a real laboratory environment was created, and a user study comparing two needle navigation visualizations was conducted. The study simulated identical experiments in both AR and VR to assess if similar results would emerge. Our findings indicate that both AR and VR experiments exhibited comparable effects in terms of performance and workload of both needle insertion visualizations. This study serves as a preliminary step in demonstrating the feasibility of using VR as an evaluation environment for projective AR visualizations.