Virtual Reality and Oceanography: Overview, Applications, and Perspective

Abstract

With the ongoing, exponential increase in ocean data from autonomous platforms, satellites, models, and in particular, the growing field of quantitative imaging, there arises a need for scalable and cost-efficient visualization tools to interpret these large volumes of data. With the recent proliferation of consumer grade head-mounted displays, the emerging field of virtual reality (VR) has demonstrated its benefit in numerous disciplines, ranging from medicine to archeology. However, these benefits have not received as much attention in the ocean sciences. Here, we summarize some of the ways that virtual reality has been applied to this field. We highlight a few examples in which we (the authors) demonstrate the utility of VR as a tool for ocean scientists. For oceanic datasets that are well-suited for three-dimensional visualization, virtual reality has the potential to enhance the practice of ocean science.

Assessment of holographic microscopy for quantifying marine particle size and concentration

“…The CCV Holographic Image Processing Pipeline (Fig. 2, herein referred to as the CCV Pipeline 5 ), developed by our group, is an unsupervised analysis package relevant to point‐source holographic microscopes that automates the process of determining the optimal focal depths of particles from the 4‐Deep Octopus software for high‐throughput hologram analysis (Walcutt et al 2019). First, the CCV Pipeline saves slices of the hologram (i.e., focal planes) from Octopus in user‐specified μ m increments across the 22 mm path between the point source and the camera.…”