Virtual Reality-Based Visualization of Large Geometric Data

Understanding and forming new hypotheses about data are two fundamental aspects shared by many scientific disciplines. When working with surface-based data such as geometric data, these aspects are largely facilitated by visualization. Visualization however, becomes more challenging as data complexity increases. To tackle this complexity we need new ways of visualization that simplify data exploration and thereby arguably aid inductive reasoning. Virtual Reality has the potential to be one such way.

When visualizing complex geometric datasets in Virtual Reality they often end up being simplified. It is perhaps because of the performance requirements of Virtual Reality and the use of existing visualization tools, such as game engines. Games engines are evolving to become more general-purpose tools but have previously prioritized visualizing many objects rather than large objects. This has led to a workflow that includes a data simplification step, creating a paradox for data visualization, where the data we wish to inspect needs to be simplified first.

In this thesis, we explore the landscape of existing visualization tools, game engines,and graphics application programming interfaces. Based on our findings we put forth principles and recommendations for the development of new Virtual Reality-based visualization tools.

In this process, we developed a bespoke tool for Virtual Reality-based visualization. We show how this tool can be used with large geometric datasets, forgoing the simplification step. We likewise explore the perceived difficulties of creating bespoke Virtual Reality-based visualization tools. In doing so we demonstrate that Virtual Reality has become a mature alternative to existing solutions for visualization.

An advantage of Virtual Reality is the 6 Degrees of Freedom interface that it provides.The interface allows for a more intuitive way of interaction but requires new interaction paradigms if we wish to take full advantage of it. We discuss how to use the affordances of portals to take advantage of this interface. As well as explore how precise interaction in Virtual Reality is when compared to desktop solutions.

Finally, we present a novel mesh processing algorithm that is simple to implement and results in high performance when used in practice on new hardware.