VOIR: Virtual Reality Visualization Software for Large-Scale Simulations

Abstract

Recent technological advances have significantly improved the quality of virtual reality (VR) provided by head-mounted display (HMD) systems. The immersive experiences provided by contemporary HMDs provide an effective environment for scientific research, especially for three-dimensional data visualization. Plasma physics has decades of history of using VR technologies for visualizations with particular emphasis on room-sized, large-scale display systems called CAVE. Modern HMDs are a cost-effective alternative to CAVEs. This study focuses on replicating the CAVE’s VR software, VFIVE, developed at the National Institute for Fusion Science. The newly developed software for HMDs, VOIR, is built on Unity with the OpenXR plugin. It allows for interactive analysis of 3D scalar and vector fields in VR. One of the key features of VOIR is the ability to enlarge and analyze specific regions of large-scale simulation data in real time.