Stepping inside the cosmic web: a pilot in virtual reality cosmology

Master's student Florian Unger, from the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) at Stockholm University, has spent the spring term running a small but carefully designed experiment in the offices of the Oskar Klein Centre (OKC), Department of Physics. The project was facilitated by Prof. Jens Jasche (Department of Physics, SU), supported on the experimental side by PhD student Pontus Holma, and academically supervised by Luis Quintero at DSV.

An ongoing effort

Florian came to the project through the Extrality Lab at DSV — the digital-sciences home of immersive tech research at SU — where the Manticore group had been showing off a VR setup originally built for outreach. This led Florian to consider whether VR could earn its place in actual research work, and not only as a tool for outreach.
"This is a pilot project to find out if there's actual utility to these technologies — what the challenges, obstacles, and reasons are for why cosmologists aren't using them," Florian says. Surveys of the broader astronomical community suggest fewer than a third of researchers have ever used immersive displays as part of their work. Asking people who have never tried VR what they dislike about it is not a particularly useful question; Florian's experiment instead put the headset into the hands of working cosmologists at the OKC to analyse the outcome.

What VR contributes

The dataset comes from the Manticore project, led by Jasche and collaborators — a Bayesian dark matter “digital twin” reconstruction of the universe’s initial conditions, that aims to be the most detailed model of the local universe currently available. The structures of interest are the three components of the cosmic web: dense clusters where galaxies congregate, the filaments that thread between them, and the near-empty voids in between. Think of it less as a starscape and more as a tangle of cobwebs strung between knots, with empty rooms in the middle.

Researchers normally label these structures the same way radiologists have read CT scans since the 1970s: paging through one flat slice at a time and reconstructing the 3D shape in their heads.

Each of the twelve participants did the labelling task once on a flat screen and once inside IDaVIE, an open-source VR tool originally built by South African researchers for the MeerKAT radio survey. Under a fixed five-minute budget, participants covered roughly 2.17 times more volume in VR than on the flat screen, and they spread their work evenly through the cube rather than concentrating on a thin band of slices. The qualitative side of the study lined up with the numbers.

"The researchers were largely amazed by it, and positively surprised overall. Most would have loved to integrate this into their workflow in one way or another," Florian says. "But for those specific workflows, the tool needs to become more easily integrated into their pipelines."

Future applications

The analysis finished a few days before this piece was written and Florian's thesis draft is due for evaluation in roughly three and a half weeks. Several participants suggested independently that the most promising next step is a hybrid setup, where an algorithm produces a first-pass labelling and a human in VR corrects and seeds it. A second thread is dialogue with the IDaVIE developers in South Africa, who are likely to be interested in feedback grounded in real cosmologist workflows — better undo, opacity control, multi-dataset overlays, and more auxiliary tooling that lives inside the headset, so researchers do not need to take it off mid-task.

Beyond academia, the project has potentially opened the door to future conversations with industry partners working on immersive analytics, though no such collaboration has yet been started. While VR has much development left before it can become a mainstream analytical tool in cosmology, the technical barrier has dropped low enough that studies like this one can probe its viability under real research conditions.