the benefits of immersion for spatial understanding of complex underground cave systems
A common reason for using immersive virtual environments (IVEs) in visualization is the hypothesis that IVEs should provide a higher level of spatial understanding for complex 3D structures, such as those found in underground cave systems. Therefore, we aimed to explore the use of IVEs for visualization of underground caves, and to determine the benefits of immersion for viewing such models. We ran an experiment in which domain experts answered questions with two different levels of immersion. The results show that for certain tasks the more immersive system significantly improved accuracy, speed, and comprehension over the non-immersive environment, and that 3D visualization overall is a good match for the underground cave data.
immersion spatial understanding cave visualization