Background: Immersive Science was started to build and distribute custom VR applications for the scientific research community. ImmSci (“im sigh”) builds tools based on the needs of researchers world-wide.  Working with those scientists, VR applications have been created for the biomedical and astronomical research communities. The ability to both see and interact with data (grabbing, scaling, adjusting,  sharing, collaborating) significantly accelerates understanding. 

Best Use: VR tools have been found most valuable in the hypothesis generation step of scientific research.  Precise detail measurements are well suited to existing analysis tools. However, when you are viewing new, high resolution, multi-channel data, you just don’t know what you will find. You can’t design experiments to validate hypotheses, until you make initial observations that lead to new hypothesis. This is where existing StarGateVR, ExMicroVR, and ConfocalVR customers are finding immersive visualization and manipulation highly useful.

ImmSci tools have been published in The Journal of Molecular Biology, and described in Nature Toolbox and GeekWire. (See News & Publications), and have been downloaded by over 200 research institutes worldwide. Our newest product, StarGateVR, was presented at the 2023 American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.