VR Showcase
Thomas Roßberg
Research Software Engineer @ Helmholtz Imaging, MDC Berlin
Oct 1, 2026
Displaying your data in 3D
- 3D data? Why not watch it in 3D with a VR headset?!
- … you borrow one and try to set it up for hours …
- And notice: it’s not straightforward to get working :/
Background and general info
- depth perception through: stereo view + motion parallax
- good hardware/GPU needed: 2 eyes/displays with many pixels (2 x 2160 × 2160px = 8M px/frame) and high, consistent framerate (72-144Hz) to avoid VR-sickness
- typical: Render frames on computer (better GPU), stream (compressed) frames/video to VR headset
- streaming: cable or Wifi, but both require high bandwidth
- Windows support okay, Linux support worse
- Labeling:
- works well/is quicker/is more consistent across labelers
Tools
| Tool | Notes | Windows | Linux | View | Annotate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blender + VR Scene Inspector | works well | x | x | x | - |
| + Microscopy Nodes | to load volumetric data (tiff/zarr), but big volumes not fast on full resolution | x | x | x | - |
| syGlass | commercial, but works okay | x | - | x | x |
| sciview (Fiji plugin) | not polished, controller support missing -> WASD/keyboard needed | x | maybe? | x | - |
untested:
- ParaView
- 3D Slicer with SlicerVirtualReality add-on
- arivis VisionVR: commercial, allows editing
Linux support
Option running in Quest Browser
- maybe possible, but untested
- mobile GPU -> limited compute
- VTK.js or three.js officially support it
Testing
- try it yourself today