Virtual reality enabled scientific visualization workflow

For decades Virtual Reality (VR) has remained out of our offices and everyday workflows due to its high cost, its custom-built nature, and its often narrow design for highly specific tasks. These characteristics create a very high entry barrier for most users to use VR technology. Users typically had to be well funded, possess a high degree of expertise, spend weeks of effort porting VR capable software, or go to a specialized visualization laboratory. Recently, the cost is coming down significantly as new affordable consumer-grade VR devices are becoming available (e.g., zSpace). However, in order to incorporate VR technology into our everyday office settings, the entry barrier must be lowered significantly. This paper describes a VR framework that lowers the entry barrier for everyday users. The framework is designed on the visualization workflow of typical users working with scientific visualization in university settings. It includes a regular desktop computer, a typical non-VR display, a consumer-grade immersive VR display (zSpace), and frequently-used visualization applications (ParaView, EnSight). By designing and building this framework, we aim at measuring and studying the usefulness and effects of integrating VR technology in everyday office settings. While the framework will be initially tested with ParaView, the study aims at producing generalizable findings that extend to users of other 3D desktop applications such as 3DS Max or Maya. This can help users and software companies to add similar support in their packages and allow users to experience VR in everyday environments.