ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a practical solution integrating consumer virtual reality (VR) hardware into a scientific visualization pipeline. It shows the benefits of such hardware, but especially the challenges of using it with existing scientific visualization tools. The ParaView-Unreal bridge demonstrates an automatic process to send arbitrary geometry to an Unreal VR scene from within ParaView. In the future, it would be beneficial for the area of scientific visualization if any arbitrary scientific visualization tool or pipeline could send its geometry over to an Unreal VR scene. The chapter also shows how the Unreal VR plugin is able to maintain a 90 Hz rendering loop while transmitting geometry data from ParaView and updating graphics resources within Unreal. A fundamental goal of the bridge is for the user to be able to efficiently perform certain actions in the VR environment that they are familiar with in ParaView as well.
