A VR/AR Data Visualization Tool for Remote Collaborations

Computational physicists and diagnosticians need to analyze 3-Dimensional data to gain understanding of their simulations or diagnostic results. Visualizing 3D Physics effects by use of 2D screens can limit understanding or even create misunderstandings. Communication of results between collaborators can be difficult when using 2D images or movies, sent by email with written explanations: one finds oneself repeating or missing important information. 3D models can be seen with the use of stereoscopic motion-tracking head-mounted displays such as Oculus VR’s Oculus Rift or Microsoft’s Hololens. These devices attach to the head like oversized ski goggles and project separate images to each eye creating an illusion to the user of a 3-dimensional immersive space. By immersing the user into a virtual reality, the user can more easily visualize, explore, and interact with their data. By augmenting the reality of the user with holograms, they can view, explore, and interact their data with colleagues as if it were physically in the room with them. Full 3D data already is collected by computational physicists and diagnosticians. Existing simulation code and diagnostics data would not need to be modified for use with this program. Additionally, Oculus VR’s Oculus Rift can be used in a collaborative fashion. Multiple scientists could both view and interpret a data-set in real-time, facilitating quick and accurate information transfer. We propose to develop a Physics Visualization tool for use with major commercial VR/AR head-mounted display products and open-source visualization software Paraview’s virtual reality interface. Common data visualization models such as contour, pseudocolor, vector, etc, will be available to the user. The visualization tool will use existing data formats like HDF5 and VTK to facilitate use with existing datasets. Additionally, we propose to develop the tool to allow multiple users to interact with the same dataset in real-time from HPC systems building off of Paraview’s remote interactive visualization capabilities. During Phase I, we will develop the prototype software implementation (Alpha testing) and in Phase II the demonstration version, and do beta-testing using customer input.