Heads up A Study of Assistive Visualizations for Localisation Guidance in Virtual Reality

Zusammenfassung

In minimally invasive surgery, surgeons always rely on camera-based techniques as, unlike in open surgery, they cannot see directly into the patient’s body. Providing the necessary equipment for surgeons to become accustomed to these types of devices can be expensive and time-consuming. A much more cost-effective and versatile approach to train surgeons or prepare already trained surgeons for upcoming operations is to create surgical simulations in Virtual Reality (VR). To establish VR in the field of minimally invasive surgery, we need to consider some VR-specific limitations. Although virtual reality provides better depth perception and localization of objects compared to a conventional desktop application, it still needs to be improved to match real-life. Our approach to reduce these offsets in VR is to use different assistive visualizations. Therefore, we conducted a quantitative user study with 19 volunteers each performing 40 trials of five different visualizations. Our results indicate that two of the five visualizations (Heatmap with Isolines and Arrow Glyphs) are able to reduce the occurrent error, making training in Virtual Reality more suitable for minimally invasive surgery.