mint: Integrating Scientific Visualizations Into Virtual Reality

Abstract

We present an image-based approach to integrate state-of-the-art scientific visualizations into virtual reality (VR) environments: the mint visualization/VR inter-operation system. We enable the integration of visualization algorithms from within their visualization software frameworks directly into VR, without the need to explicitly port visualization implementations to the underlying VR framework---thus retaining their features, capabilities, and optimizations. Consequently, our approach also facilitates enriching VR-based scientific data exploration with established or novel VR immersion and interaction techniques available in VR authoring tools. The separation of concerns enables researchers and users in the two domains, virtual immersive environments and scientific visualization, to independently work with existing software suitable for their domain, while being able to easily interface with one another. We present our system architecture and inter-operation protocol (mint), an example of a collaborative VR environment implemented in the Unity Engine (VRAUKE), as well as the integration of the protocol for the visualization frameworks Inviwo, MegaMol, and ParaView. Our implementation is publicly available as open-source software.