Extending a Virtual Reality Nasal Cavity Education Tool with Volume Rendering

Answering the question whether virtual reality (VR), thanks to its ability to invoke real three-dimensional sensation in users, can improve the learning of spatial structures compared to traditional methods requires well-designed VR applications. We aim to investigate this question through a VR education tool that teaches the structure of the human nasal cavity. Our earlier studies suggested that an important feature of such VR education tools should be to give the context of the nasal cavity, i.e. visualize the rest of the anatomy of the head. In this paper, we discuss our approach of a VR learning application that achieves this using direct volume rendering.