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沉浸式立体显示器，使任何研究人员（专家或学生）能够直接查看并与固有的复杂3D共聚焦数据集进行交互，以便在科学分析期间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的软件产品FluidVis的原型，并测试其作为广泛访问的沉浸式可视化工具的可行性，来改善基础生物医学研究，特别是在细胞和发育生物学方面。我们的工具将在经过四年研究开发的经过验证的研究原型之后建模，导致传统方法错过的重要发现，并且正式的用户研究发现它比传统的桌面工具更有效。然而，该模型系统仅在一个机构使用，因为它使用了一个完全沉浸式的“洞穴”显示，这是昂贵的获得和维护，研究软件是不够用户友好的生产使用。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，并研究和开发针对新工作环境量身定制的新用户界面。我们的目标是创建一个适合在典型的生物实验室中使用的系统，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。因此，我们的第一阶段项目的中心目的是确定一个成熟的，但通常无法访问的新的可视化功能（沉浸式，立体显示）广泛访问生物学家的可行性。如果第一阶段取得成功，第二阶段项目的中心目的将是充分说明，现场测试，并使强大和实用的商业标准的广泛访问版本的新的可视化功能。

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.