Virtual Reality for Information Visualization Might Just Work This Time

In the 1990’s, Virtual Reality (VR) was discredited as a means of presenting Information Visualization (InfoViz). Mercurio and Erickon (Mercurio et al., 1990), noted several problems required to be overcome before the potential of VR for scientific visualization could be realized: low image resolution, user navigation, small tracking volume, low tracker update rate, and poor user interfaces. Even with this negative reaction, a number of researchers continued pursuing this line of investigation (for example, the work of Bowman et al., 2003). As hardware and graphics techniques improved, plausible applicability of VR to InfoViz was slowly being realized. Currently, Immersive Analytics (Marriott et al., 2018) is an emerging direction for the use of VR and other immersive technologies to improve understanding of visualization problems. There are a number of factors that influence my belief that VR supported InfoViz can be achieved. Firstly, the hardware is so much better today; this is regarding robustness, availability, and cost. The software support has greatly improved in recent years for VR and InfoViz. Because of these two reasons, far more people can investigate this problem today. Visualization is more advanced from the 1990s in their techniques and the problem domains they are applied to. There have been a number of successes for InfoViz. Still there are domains that are challenging for traditional visualization techniques, such as high dimensional data (Tang et al., 2016). VR is a potential tool for these challenging domains by allowing the user to visualize and interact with the data with new and different techniques (Sherman and Craig, 2018). A major reason VR might be able to support InfoViz is the rise of commercial VR systems. These systems are now commodity devices designed for home use. As with graphics hardware, VR hardware is benefiting from being a large-scale product. Current VR systems are complete. These systems have integrated HMDs, tracking systems, and handheld input devices (Anthes et al., 2016). Today there are well-designed input devices that are part of the commercial systems. What is important to realize is they are reliable and function with minimal set up. The computers today have much better graphics capability than ever before, and Table 1 provides an overview of the improvement of graphics engines over the decades. In comparison to previous VR systems, today’s systems are inexpensive. Current systems complete systems (including computing) are approximate $(US) 3K. Five-six years ago1 an equivalent system would cost about $20K, and 20 years ago2 about $1 million. Before the integrated systems of today, VR systems were assembled and created by the end user. The HMD and tracking system were independent purchases, and you had to mount the tracking sensor onto the HMD yourself. There were no mounting points on the HMD, and the HMDs all