ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors describe a haptic representation of volumetric data in a Fish Tank virtual reality (VR) system for interactive visualization. Volume rendering is a powerful tool for visualizing scientific data. Colin Ware firstly introduced the Fish Tank VR system in 1993. The term “Fish Tank” is intended to contrast with “Immersion” and suggests a small-localized workspace. The idea is to use a conventional monitor, a head tracker to measure head position and derive use eye position from this. The idea of multimodal interaction in Human Computer Interaction has been shown as an important approach to improve user performance for a variety of tasks. An ideal VR system tries to make use of all sensory modalities to create a realistic environment as well. The accurate collation and registration between visual and force feedback could provide faithful interaction feedback in a VR application, especially in the application with scientific data.
