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Issue No.03 - May/June (2008 vol.14)
pp: 551-563
ABSTRACT
We present a participant study that compares biological exploration tasks using volume renderings of laser confocal microscopy data across three environments which vary in level of immersion. For the tasks, data, and visualization approach used in our study, we found that subjects qualitatively preferred and quantitatively performed better in environments with greater levels of immersion. Subjects performed real-world biological data analysis tasks that emphasized understanding spatial relationships including characterizing the general features in a volume, identifying co-located features, and reporting geometric relationships such as whether clusters of cells were coplanar. After analyzing data in each environment, subjects were asked to choose which environment they wanted to analyze additional data sets in-- subjects uniformly selected the Cave environment.
INDEX TERMS
Virtual reality, Evaluation/methodology, Applications
CITATION
Prabhat, Andrew Forsberg, Michael Katzourin, Kristi Wharton, Mel Slater, "A Comparative Study of Desktop, Fishtank, and Cave Systems for the Exploration of Volume Rendered Confocal Data Sets", IEEE Transactions on Visualization & Computer Graphics, vol.14, no. 3, pp. 551-563, May/June 2008, doi:10.1109/TVCG.2007.70433
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