Virtual reality, or VR, is not just for fun-filled video games and other visual entertainment. This technology, involving a computer-generated environment with objects that seem real, has found many scientific and educational applications as well.
Sean Preins, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of California, Riverside, has created a VR application called VIRTUE, for “Virtual Interactive Reality Toolkit for Understanding the EIC,” that is a game changer in how particle and nuclear physics data can be seen.
Made publicly available on Christmas Day, VIRTUE can be used to visualize experiments and simulated data from the upcoming Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC, a planned major new nuclear physics research facility at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York.
Meant to be an innovative outreach platform for a general audience, VIRTUE is also an educational tool for students and senior scientists alike. It will be released on Steam, a popular video game engine, for free.
“Using VR to visualize particle physics data allows us to get a sense of scale with these experiments that just can’t be replicated on a small screen, and it allows us to explore the complexity of the data in space and in time,” Preins said. “A large motivation for this program is to make the science of collider physics more accessible. Tools like VIRTUE allow us to educate students on what goes on inside a particle detector, and how we can extract useful information from this data to study some of the deepest laws of nature.”
