Virtual Reality Point Cloud Annotation

This work presents an immersive headset-based virtual reality visualization and annotation system for point clouds, oriented towards application on laser scans of plants. The system can be used to paint regions or individual points with fine detail, even with large, dense point clouds. A non-immersive desktop interface was designed for comparison within the same application. A within-subjects user study (N=16) was conducted to compare these interfaces for annotation and counting tasks. Results showed a strong preference for the immersive virtual reality interface, likely as a result of perceived and actual significant differences in task performance.