A user study to understand motion visualization in virtual reality

Studies of motion are fundamental to science. For centuries, pictures of motion have factored importantly in making scientific discoveries possible. Today, there is perhaps no tool more powerful than interactive virtual reality (VR) for conveying complex space-time data to scientists, doctors, and others; however, relatively little is known about how to design virtual environments in order to best facilitate these analyses. In designing virtual environments for presenting scientific motion data (e.g., 4D data captured via medical imaging or motion tracking) our intuition is most often to “reanimate” these data in VR, displaying moving virtual bones and other 3D structures in virtual space as if the viewer were watching the data being collected in a biomechanics lab. However, recent research in other contexts suggests that although animated displays are effective for presenting known trends, static displays are more effective for data analysis.