In this study, we evaluated the quantitative effectiveness of navigation operation in a virtual reality (VR) volumetric viewer, in order to confirm the effectiveness of VR in life sciences. The analytical work for biological data is a promising application of VR because users can manipulate 3D data intuitively in VR. However, few studies have focused on the quantitative evaluations of such applications. Therefore, we conducted an experiment to evaluate the speedup of navigation operation (sequences of translation, rotation, and scaling) in VR applications for 3D microscopy. We compared the task completion time between a non-VR visualization tool and a VR visualization tool. The speedup by the VR immersive visualizer was found to be 203% in the most effective case. The result showed that the VR immersive visualizer enables more efficient navigation than the conventional volumetric viewer.

Modern industrial products should incorporate inclusive designs, be sustainable, and capable of addressing emerging usage. The adaptation interface is a supplementary approach to meet these targets. To make capacitive touchscreens adaptive, a method to simulate finger touch is needed. Takashina and others have proposed quasi-touch to allow a touch panel to recognize touches electrically without using fingers. Virtual reality is expected to be found in practical applications now after success in entertainment applications. In such practical applications, a mechanism to connect real objects and virtual objects is needed. We call this mechanism a real-virtual bridge, which is a form of an adaptation interface. As a simple example, a user might want to operate their smartphone when they does a job in the virtual world. Therefore, we applied quasi-touch to allow users to operate real smartphones from virtual worlds, and constructed a proof-of-concept prototype. In a preliminary evaluation, a participant played a real smartphone game in the virtual space and reported that he felt as if he had played a game on a real smartphone.

This manuscript introduces a virtual reality (VR) environment to support research activity in the real world. We constructed a prototype to support intellectual activity in the field of life sciences using VR. In the prototype, the users can operate a real microscope from a virtual space, along with other useful equipment such as huge displays, and analyze images carefully and intuitively using a immersive visualizer seamlessly integrated in the environment. We belive that our prototype is promising for expanding the potential of VR applications.

Vibration measurement systems are widely used in the industry. A variety of vibration measurement techniques are proposed, including methods using an acceleration sensor, a laser displacement meter, and tracking a marker using a camera. However, these methods have limitations that allow only one point to be measured and require markers. We present a novel, non-contact full field joint measurement technique both of vibrations and shape based on phase-shifting. Our key idea is to acquire the frequency of vibrating objects using FFT to analyze the phase-shift error of vibrating objects. Our proposed algorithm estimates the phase-shift error by iterating frame-to-frame optimization and pixel-to-pixel optimization. A feature of our approach is to measure the surface of vibrating at different frequencies without markers or texture in full fields. Our developed system is a low cost system, which is composed of a digital-light-processing (DLP) projector and camera (100 frames per second). The results of our experiments show that low frequency vibration of objects can be measured with high accuracy in non-contact. Also, reconstruction of the vibrating object surface can be performed with high accuracy.