Tech Report CS-05-02

A Comparison of a Cave and A Fish Tank VR system for Counting Biological Features in a Volume

Jurgen P. Schulze, Andrew S. Forsberg

March 2005

Abstract:

Many scientists analyze 3D biological data by counting cells and other structures when automatic algorithms cannot reliably do it. Due to the complicated nature of this data, our hypothesis is that users can count faster and more easilyin a CAVE-like environment than in a Fish Tank. Our objective in this work was to determine if there was a difference between these environments in their entirety, with respect to user performance for a counting task. Both environments are standard visualization devices, and for our task we used identical wand-controlled user interfaces. To help test our hypothesis we conducted a user study in which seven subjects performed the counting task in both environments. In general, our results showed that subjects marked cells at a higher rate in the Cave and preferred working in it.

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