A multimodal virtual reality interface for 3d interaction with vtk

The object oriented Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is widely used for scientific visualization. VTK is a visualization li-brary that provides functions for presenting 3D data. In-teraction with the visualized data is done by mouse and keyboard. Support for three-dimensional and multimodal input is non-existent. This paper describes VR-VTK: a multimodal interface to VTK on a desktop virtual environment. Six degree of free-dom input devices are used for spatial 3D interaction. Head tracking is used for camera control. Pedals for clutching. Speech input is used for application commands and system control. To address several problems specific for spatial 3D inter-action, a number additional features, such as more complex interaction methods and enhanced depth perception are dis-cussed. Furthermore, the need for multimodal input to sup-port interaction with the visualization is shown. An existing VTK application is ported to VR-VTK. Infor-mal user experiences are presented