Résumé: This article provides a snapshot of immersive virtual reality( IVR) use for scienti .c visualization, in the context of the evolution of computing in general and of user interfaces in particular. The main thesis of this article is that IVR has great potential for dealing with the serious problem of exponentiallygrowing scienti .c datasets. Our abilityto produce large datasets both through numerical simulation and through data acquisition via sensors is outrunning our abilityto make sense of those datasets. While our idea of ‘‘large ’’datasets used to be measured in hundreds of gigabytes, based at least in part on what we could easilystore, manipulate, and displayin real time, today ’s science and engineering are producing terabytes and soon even petabytes, both from observation via sensors and as output from numerical simulation. Clearly, visualization by itself will not solve the problem of understanding truly large datasets that would overwhelm both displaycapacityand the human visual system. We advocate a human –computer partnership that draws on the strengths of each partner, with algorithmic culling and feature- detection used to identifythe small fraction of the data that should be visuallyexamined in detail bythe human. Our hope is that IVR will be a potent tool to let humans ‘‘see ’’patterns, trends, and anomalies in their data well beyond what they can do with conventional 3D desktop displays.

Langue: Anglais