Reality Check

Editor and General Manager

At the 2015 Society for Neuroscience annual meeting, I came across two exhibitors displaying virtual reality tools. In 2016, my informal survey found double that number. I thought I might find more, but online searches using the terms “research” and “virtual reality” yielded a lot of returns on research into VR and very few on research using VR. Yet it seems this is a technology whose time has come.

Each of the companies I encountered was doing something unique—they all thought various niches within the sciences were worth an investment. Whether any of these early entries will be around in a few years only time will tell. But system performance is going up and costs are coming down. While I doubt low-cost products such as Google Cardboard will find use in VR, they are indicators of improving price/performance metrics. More importantly, in the best high-end VR workstations, performance issues have now been worked out, and at a reasonable price point. The door is open, come on in.

arivis AG is a software company headquartered in Munich that develops solutions for IT. InViewR virtual reality software provides a deeply immersive experience, allowing free navigation using hand gestures to travel through data sets derived from light-sheet, confocal or electron microscopy or computer or magnetic-resonance tomography. According to the company, displaying image data in a VR environment restores context that is lost when viewing tissues and interconnected structures in 2-D. The Direct Volume Rendering technique allocates every single data point of the original 3-D images to a voxel (a three-dimensional pixel) within the rendered object. The user can move freely and inspect the specimen from any angle and position without limitations. This also implies that measurements within a volume, verification of co-localizations or following structures in 4-D space (that is 3-D plus time) are possible. The best way to grasp the capabilities is to view a video at https://www.arivis.com/en/imaging-science/arivis-inviewr (2-D, but representative).

HVS Image (Oxfordshire, U.K.) combines 35 years of experience in animal behavior analysis with 25 years of experience in human behavior and psychophysics to create the highly immersive HVS 4D VR environment for humans. HVS 4D VR features full stereo 3-D with real-world physics, allowing almost any experiment in any physical environment to be created in minutes (or to be selected from a growing library of worlds and objects), including replicating animal tests with humans (e.g., Morris Water Maze, Open Field Test, Novel Object Recognition), to studying behavior in virtual forests, suburbs and homes (researching spatial learning, anxiety, etc.) with built-in analysis and Matlab export. Interfaces include headsets, gamepads, “free walking” and the HVS omnidirectional treadmill, on a unique high-power HVS 4D VR workstation.

WorldViz (Santa Barbara, Calif.) offers a complete hardware and software solution that allows users to create virtual reality, or virtually real, environments. Seated VR systems are offered, as are standing and walking products. Want to design a lab? Walk through the allotted space, pick up and reorient casework and apparatus, etc. True freedom of movement is offered, and users can navigate and interact at scale. (Take a stroll here: http://www.worldviz.com/walking-virtual-reality-system.) Further examples include the deployment of virtual reality solutions in surgery simulations and medical training to psychological treatment and patient-care experiences.

Intific (Austin, Texas, a subsidiary of Cubic Global Defense) offers a range of products, many for training purposes. Of interest here is NeuroBridge, a simulation toolkit that allows researchers to easily develop and explore complex immersive experiences in order to understand human cognition. Fully immersive VR simulations allow biophysiological data from the user to change and impact the simulation in real time. That sounds pretty cool.

It’s possible to spot some trends. The first is education: any activity in which students can learn from being within an environment is a likely candidate. Studying reactions to a given environment is another scenario, especially when the VR experience is more accessible, more hospitable and less costly. The simulations provided by, and reactions to, the virtual environment, and the data it provides are becoming increasingly useful and valid. The second is any area in which the object being studied is best examined in three dimensions. For example, there is a lot of data showing the benefits of studying cells in a 3-D culture platform, a more lifelike environment. If it hasn’t been done already, it might not be long before someone is imaging the same in great detail and then donning a headset and taking a stroll through a tumor for a close-up study of morphology. While my imagination on this topic is surely limited, that’s not so for all the designers and engineers working in VR. But Matt McClosky, you were right—VR is here, and it’s going to be more here tomorrow.

Steve Ernst is editor and general manager, American Laboratory/Labcompare; [email protected]

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