FluidVis: A Semi-Immersive Visualization Tool for Confocal Microscopy

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our long-term goal is to make available an immersive, stereoscopic display that enables any investigator (expert or student) to directly view and interact with inherently complex 3D confocal datasets in order to leverage intuitive perceptual skills during scientific analysis. The overarching goal of this project is to improve basic biomedical research, especially in cellular and developmental biology, by further developing a prototype of our planned software product, FluidVis, and testing its feasibility as a widely accessible immersive visualization tool. Our tool will be modeled after a proven research prototype that has been developed through four years of research, led to important discoveries missed by conventional methods, and for which formal user studies have found it more effective than conventional desktop tools. However, the model system is used only at one institution because it uses a fully-immersive Cave display which is expensive to obtain and maintain, and the research software is not user friendly enough for production use. Our basic approach will be to develop the FluidVis system by substituting the fully-immersive Cave display with a more practical display (less expensive and semi-immersive) and to research and develop a new user interface tailored to the new working environment. Our objective is to create a system suitable for use in a typical biology laboratory that retains the main benefits of the Cave-based system. To achieve our long-term goal, feasibility testing and development are needed to reach that goal. Thus, the central purpose of our Phase I project is to determine the feasibility of making a proven but generally inaccessible new visualization capability (immersive, stereoscopic display) widely accessible to biologists. If Phase I is successful, the central purpose of Phase II project would be to fully-specify, field-test, and make robust and practical to commercial standards the widely accessible version of the new visualization capability.