
point clouds are "data structures used to represent a collection of multidimensional points".

Īlongside various other types of data, point clouds have been represented in immersive environments in this HMD focused era of virtual reality. More recently, with the emergence of the new generation Head Mounted Display (HMD) VR technology, the research in this area has shifted to this type of systems. The use of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies for data visualization and analysis is a research topic that dates to the beginning of the millennium, when Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) systems started being used by many research laboratories. The end result allows the user to perform basic transformative tasks to the point cloud with an ease of use and intuitive feeling unmatched by the traditional desktop-based tools. Several editing tools were also developed, designed with the HMD controllers in mind. It is capable of parsing classified point cloud files with extracted objects and representing them in a virtual environment. An immersive application for virtual reality HMDs was developed in Unity to help research this hypothesis. It is hypothesized that as with other types of data, bringing direct interactions and 3D visualization to point clouds may increase the ease of performing basic handling tasks. While some strides have been made in the visualization and analysis of point clouds in immersive environments, these have yet to be used for direct manipulation interactions. However, one type of data has been left neglected, the point cloud. The use of virtual reality technologies for data visualization and analysis has been an emerging topic of research in the past years.
