Evaluation of Spatial Perception in Virtual Reality within a Medical Context

Abstract

This paper compares three different visualization techniques to improve spatial perception in virtual reality applications. In most virtual reality applications, spatial relations cannot be sufficiently estimated to make precise statements about the locations and positions of objects. Especially in the field of medical applications, it is crucial to correctly perceive the depth and structure of a given object. Thus, visualization techniques need to be developed to support the spatial perception. To address this, we carried out a user study to evaluate different visualization techniques and deal with the question of how glyphs influence spatial perception in a virtual reality application. Therefore, our evaluation compares arrow glyphs, heatmaps with isolines and pseudo-chromadepth in terms of improving the spatial perception within virtual reality. Based on the study results it can be concluded that spatial perception can be improved with the help of glyphs, which should motivate further research in this area.