[waleedka]

I'm intrigued! How do you interact with these images right now? Do you display it on screen and rotate it with the mouse? Can you elaborate a bit more about how would a VR/AR solution add value here other than being a fancier solution?

[cake93]

Manipulation with the mouse if you're lucky. Often this would involve Matlab, or some specialized software. But in many cases we don't even have this and people use Fiji to scroll through the z-dimension with a slider.

For presentations people often render a movie with Matlab, investing hours to get it right. With AR, you could take a movie by filming with a virtual camera in your hand.

Augmented Reality would add the most value. Some examples:

+ intuitive exploration of the data (imagine learning about a plant by scrolling through cross-sections)

+ intuitive manipulation of the perspective (the mouse 3D rotation thing is really tricky)

+ collaborative viewing

+ annotation of objects (eg. tracing a filament through 3D by following it with the finger)

+ avoid occlusion by just zooming and moving in

+ be able to point at things in a 3D image

It would bring much more natural ways to interact with the data. Essentially scaling up your molecular structure 10^6 to 10^7-fold so you can explore it as you'd explore a sculpture.