Demonstration of visual design of plankton in VR multi-modal interactive system

Plankton is very important to lake ecosystem, but traditional research methods have limitations. Virtual reality (VR) technology provides a new paradigm for the visualization of ecological science with its immersive interactive characteristics, which can visually present the microscopic world of plankton. In this study, the interaction mechanism is designed by the dynamic coupling of gesture recognition and particle system, which realizes the natural manipulation of plankton behavior by users, and establishes a multi-dimensional coding scheme to visualize the spatial distribution of plankton community, balancing information density and visual readability. At the same time, the cognitive load of users in VR environment is quantified, and whether the interaction design based on VR is better than the traditional method is verified. The experiment recruited 60 subjects and used 2×2 mixed design to investigate the influence of different interaction modes and task complexity on user performance. The results show that the VR group is significantly superior to the traditional group in the aggregation task time, density adjustment error, abnormal region recognition rate, path efficiency and other indicators, and the cognitive load is significantly reduced, and the visual search efficiency is improved.