Multi-modal Interaction in Biomedicine - Ambient Intelligence for Scientific Discovery - page 191

Fig. 5. Clipping in the desktop VRE (The original data set was provided by Dr. C.
Taylor, Stanford University, USA).
by means of a menu or a slider. A unique identification number helps to identify
a concrete slice. The GUI contains two viewers: one presents the 3D object and
another one shows a high-resolution slice of interest, which has been generated
as a result of the intersection of a 3D object with a clipping plane built by a
user. The combination of these two views provides several advantages. First of
all, a user can have a 3D view of an object, which is important for planning a
further intervention; and at the same time he or she can get a more detailed
view of a slice of interest by varying scale or contrast parameters. It is also im-
portant that the technique used is quite similar to the standard approach for
the visualization of CT/MRI scans familiar to the end-users of the VRE [12].
Even though, like it was mentioned above, for the manipulation and navigation
in a desktop environment a user does not need to possess extra motor skills, the
necessity to deal with the increasing number of GUI's elements may lead at a
certain moment to the deterioration of the users' orientation capabilities.
4 User Profiling
The existing prototypes of the VRE provide a sucient set of functionalities,
enabling us to take a much closer look at the usability problems. To make sure
that the system is developed in accordance with real life demands, the choice
was made to conduct a small exploratory study as a first step to investigate