The InfraVis node at Lund University has developed an application and workflow to visualize tomographic datasets in the immersive CAVE system at the Virtual Reality laboratory at LTH – Faculty of Engineering. The workflow was originally made for the LINXS hackathon SynchroMage: 3D Tomography and Visualisation for Earth’s Hidden Treasures – Environment and Climate theme, but after a positive evaluation from participants, also described in the following LINXS article, we have kept the development going.

Target audience and users

Small groups of users can experience and inspect their data in both 3D, thanks to the cave’s stereoscopic projectors. At the same time they can get a detailed view of specific cut slices in the X,Y,Z-planes. Beyond letting researchers experience their scans in a new and direct way, the vision of the project is to allow researchers and students together explore and explain their data.

Interactions

The interactive features include rotating and zooming in on the 3D volume, moving the cut planes to display different slices, overlay or switch between raw- and/or segmented- representations which allows for quality assessment of segmentations methods, as well as shift the transparency of rendering feature – all in real-time! The interaction was implemented in the Unity 3D engine and works with SteamVR compatible controllers. The rendering was implemented using HLSL shader scripts for Unity. It is currently supporting volumes with up to 768x768x768 voxels. Apart from the Unity application, we have developed a workflow to pre-process and convert image stacks to 3D-textures.

Inspecting segmentations

While simple thresholding is available directly in the visualization at runtime, we imagine potential users will have already made segmentations using their preferred techniques. The workflow will represent up to three pre-calculated segmentations as different color channels.

Further information

Note that the visualization is specifically made for the hardware setup in the VR lab. Interested researchers or educators – please contact jens.nirme@lucs.lu.se