FluidVis: A Semi-Immersive Visualization Tool for Confocal Microscopy

描述(由申请人提供)：我们的长期目标是提供一种身临其境的立体显示，使任何研究人员(专家或学生)能够直接查看固有的复杂3D共焦数据集并与其交互，以便在科学分析过程中利用直观的感知技能。该项目的总体目标是通过进一步开发我们计划中的软件产品FluidVis的原型，并测试其作为广泛可用的身临其境的可视化工具的可行性，来改进基础生物医学研究，特别是在细胞和发育生物学方面。我们的工具将仿照一个经过四年研究开发的经过验证的研究原型，该原型导致了传统方法错过的重要发现，正式的用户研究发现它比传统桌面工具更有效。然而，该模型系统只在一家机构使用，因为它使用了一个完全沉浸式的“洞穴”显示器，获得和维护成本很高，而且研究软件对用户不够友好，不能用于生产用途。我们的基本方法将是开发FluidVis系统，用更实用的显示器(更便宜和半沉浸式)取代完全沉浸式的Cave显示器，并研究和开发适合新工作环境的新用户界面。我们的目标是创建一种适用于典型生物实验室的系统，该系统保留了基于洞穴的系统的主要优点。为了实现我们的长期目标，需要进行可行性测试和开发以实现这一目标。因此，我们第一阶段项目的中心目的是确定生物学家广泛使用一种经过验证但通常无法访问的新可视化功能(沉浸式立体显示)的可行性。如果第一阶段成功，第二阶段项目的中心目的将是充分指定、实地测试新可视化能力的广泛使用版本，并使其符合商业标准。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Our long-term goal is to make available an immersive, stereoscopic display that enables any investigator (expert or student) to directly view and interact with inherently complex 3D confocal datasets in order to leverage intuitive perceptual skills during scientific analysis. The overarching goal of this project is to improve basic biomedical research, especially in cellular and developmental biology, by further developing a prototype of our planned software product, FluidVis, and testing its feasibility as a widely accessible immersive visualization tool. Our tool will be modeled after a proven research prototype that has been developed through four years of research, led to important discoveries missed by conventional methods, and for which formal user studies have found it more effective than conventional desktop tools. However, the model system is used only at one institution because it uses a fully-immersive "Cave" display which is expensive to obtain and maintain, and the research software is not user friendly enough for production use. Our basic approach will be to develop the FluidVis system by substituting the fully-immersive Cave display with a more practical display (less expensive and semi-immersive) and to research and develop a new user interface tailored to the new working environment. Our objective is to create a system suitable for use in a typical biology laboratory that retains the main benefits of the Cave-based system. To achieve our long-term goal, feasibility testing and development are needed to reach that goal. Thus, the central purpose of our Phase I project is to determine the feasibility of making a proven but generally inaccessible new visualization capability (immersive, stereoscopic display) widely accessible to biologists. If Phase I is successful, the central purpose of Phase II project would be to fully-specify, field-test, and make robust and practical to commercial standards the widely accessible version of the new visualization capability.