Abstract
The object-oriented visualization Toolkit (VTK) is widely used for scientific visualization. VTK is a visualization library that provides a large number of functions for presenting three-dimensional data. Interaction with the visualized data is controlled with two-dimensional input devices, such as mouse and keyboard. Support for real three-dimensional and multimodal input is non-existent. This paper describes VR-VTK: a multimodal interface to VTK on a virtual environment. Six degree of freedom input devices are used for spatial 3D interaction. They control the 3D widgets that are used to interact with the visualized data. Head tracking is used for camera control. Pedals are used for clutching. Speech input is used for application commands and system control. To address several problems specific for spatial 3D interaction, a number of additional features, such as more complex interaction methods and enhanced depth perception, are discussed. Furthermore, the need for multimodal input to support interaction with the visualization is shown. Two existing VTK applications are ported using VR-VTK to run in a desktop virtual reality system. Informal user experiences are presented.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Arsenault R, Ware C (2000) Eye-hand co-ordination with force feedback. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems, CHI 2000. ACM, New York, pp 408–414
Billinghurst M (1998) Put that where? Voice and gesture at the graphics interface. ACM SIGGRAPH Comput Graph 32(4):60–63
Boritz J, Booth KS (1997) A study of interactive 3D point location in a computer simulated virtual environment. In: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on virtual reality software and technology, VRST'97. ACM, New York, pp 181–187
Bryson S (1996) Virtual reality in scientific visualization. Commun ACM 39(5): 62–71
Conner DB, Snibbe SS, Herndon KP, Robbins DC, Zeleznik RC, van Dam A (1992) Three-dimensional widgets. In: Proceedings of the 1992 symposium on interactive 3D graphics, SI3D '92. ACM, New York, pp 183–188
Goldberg A, Robson D (1983) Smalltalk-80: the language and its implementation. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA
Herndon KP, Zeleznik RC, Robbins DC, Conner DB, Snibbe SS, van Dam A (1992) Interactive shadows. In: Proceedings of the 5th annual ACM symposium on user interface software and technology, UIST'92. ACM, New York, pp 1–6
Hinckley K, Pausch R, Proffitt D (1997) Attention and visual feedback: the bimanual frame of reference. In: Proceedings of the 1997 symposium on interactive 3D graphics, SI3D '97. ACM, New York, pp 121–126
Hubona GS, Wheeler PN, Shirah GW, Brandt M (1999) The relative contributions of stereo, lighting, and background scenes in promoting 3d depth visualization. ACM Trans Comput-Hum Interact 6(3):214–242
Kok AJF, van Liere R (2004) Co-location and tactile feedback for 2d widget manipulation. In: Proceedings of IEEE virtual reality 2004, VR'04. IEEE Computer Society Press, pp 233–234
Krum DM, Omoteso O, Ribarsky W, Starner T, Hodges LF (2002) Evaluation of a multimodal interface for 3D terrain visualization. In: Proceedings of the conference on visualization'02. IEEE Computer Society Press, pp 411–418
LaViola JJ (2000) MSVT: A virtual reality-based multimodal scientific visualization tool. In: Proceedings of the third IASTED international conference on computer graphics and imaging, pp 1–7
Leigh J, Rajlich PJ, Stein RJ, Johnson AE, DeFanti TA (1998) LIMBO/VTK: A tool for rapid tele-immersive visualization. In: CDROM proceedings of IEEE visualizaton '98
Mine MR, Brooks FP Jr, Sequin CH (1997) Moving objects in space: exploiting proprioception in virtual-environment interaction. In: Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on computer graphics and interactive techinques, SIGGRAPH'97. ACM/Addison-Wesley, pp 19–26
Mulder JD, van Liere R (2002) The personal space station: bringing interaction within reach. In: Proceedings of the virtual reality international conference, VRIC 2002, pp 73–81
Rajlich P, vtkPipeline.tcl. http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/~prajlich/vtkPipeline
Schindler E, Kok AJF, Terken JMB (2005) Evaluation of input modalities for interaction tasks supporting 3D object manipulation. In: Proceedings of the ICMI'05 international workshop on multimodal interaction for the visualization and exploration of scientific data, pp 18–25
Schroeder WJ, Martin KM, Lorensen WE (1996) The design and implementation of an object-oriented toolkit for 3D graphics and visualization. In: Proceedings of the 7th conference on visualization'96. IEEE Computer Society Press, pp 93–100
Schroeder W, Martin K, Lorensen B (2002) The visualization toolkit, an object-oriented approach to 3D graphics (3rd edn). Kitware Inc., New York
Shamonin D, VtkCave. http://staff.science.uva.nl/~dshamoni/myprojects/VtkCave.html
Sharma R, Zeller M, Pavlovic VI, Huang TS, Lo Z, Chu S, Zhao Y, Phillips JC, Schulten K (2000) Speech/gesture interface to a visual-computing environment. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 20(2):29–37
Shaw C, Liang J, Green M, Sun Y (1993) Decoupled simulation in virtual reality with the MR toolkit. ACM Trans Inf Syst 11(3):287–317
Taylor II RM, Hudson TC, Seeger A, Weber H, Juliano J, Helser AT (2001) VRPN: a device-independent, network-transparent vr peripheral system. In: Proceedings of the ACM symposium on virtual reality software and technology, VRST '01. ACM, New York, pp 55–61
van Dam A, Forsberg AS, Laidlaw DH, LaViola JJ, Simpson RM (2000) Immersive VR for scientific visualization: a progress report. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 20(6):26–52
van Liere R, Martens JBOS, Kok AJF, van Tienen MHAV (2005) Interacting with molecular structures: user performance versus system complexity. In: Virtual environments 2005, IPT-EGVE 2005. Eurographics Association, pp 147–156
van Liere R, Mulder JD (1999) PVR—an architecture for portable vr applications. In: Virtual environments '99, EGVE '99. Eurographics Association, pp 125–135
van Reimersdahl T, Kuhlen T, Gerndt T, Henrichs A, Bischof J (2000) ViSTA: a multimodal, platform-independent vr-toolkit based on WTK, VTK, and MPI. In: Proceedings of the 4th international immersive projection technology workshop
Vilanova A, Berenschot G, Pul, CV (2004) DTI visualization with streamsurfaces and evenly-spaced volume seeding. In: Proceedings of the joint Eurographics – IEEE TCVG symposium on visualization, VisSym'04. Eurographics Association, pp 173–182
Wanger LR, Ferwerda JA, Greenberg DP (1992) Perceiving spatial relationships in computer-generated images. IEEE Comput Graph Appl 12(3):44–58
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Arjan J. F. Kok is an assistant professor at the Department of Computer Science at the Open University of the Netherlands. He studied Computer Science at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. from the same university. He worked as a Scientist for TNO (Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research) and as assistant professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology before he joined the Open University. His research interests are visualization, virtual reality, and computer graphics.
Robert van Liere studied Computer Science at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He received his Ph.D. with the thesis “Studies in Interactive Scientific Visualization” at the University of Amsterdam. Since 1985, he has worked at CWI, the Center for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam in which he is the head of CWI’s visualization research group. Since 2004, he holds a part-time position as full professor at the Eindhoven University of Technology. His research interests are in interactive data visualization and virtual reality. He is a member of IEEE.
Rights and permissions
Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0 ), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.
About this article
Cite this article
Kok, A.J.F., van Liere, R. A multimodal virtual reality interface for 3D interaction with VTK. Knowl Inf Syst 13, 197–219 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-007-0066-6
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-007-0066-6