Welcome to a virtual tour of the University of Arizona's research MRI scanning facility.
Our 3T research scanner is located in the basement of the Biosciences Research Laboratories (BSRL) building. It is administered by the Translational Bioimaging Resource (TBIR) group, under the auspices of the Office for Research, Innovation, and Impact (RII).
For best viewing, we recommend a window size of at least 1800 x 1200, although smaller sizes should work (you'll just have to move around more).
Movement: On 3D pages, dragging your mouse should rotate the virtual enviroment and allow you to see the room from various angles. Dragging is possible but not needed on an iPad; as you can simple turn the entire iPad around to look all around the scene. Note, that because each 3D scene was captured by a 3D camera at a fixed point, you cannot move into or out of the scene, only rotate at the camera's fixed location.
Information: As you look around the various scenes, you will see bright blue spheres, we call infospheres. Clicking on one of the infospheres will pop up a window with more information about the object which the infosphere is hovering near. All popups should close when the X button in the upper right corner of the popup is clicked.
More Info (2D): In the initial scene (the MRI Console Room) you will see a blue and a green plane, each covering a desk cluttered with devices related to the operation and/or use of the MRI. Clicking on a plane will take you to a 2D page which provides more detailed information about the objects under that plane. The close button, a black X in the upper right corner of each 2D page, will return you to the main MRI Console Room scene when clicked.
Navigation: On the floor of 3D scenes, you may notice black discs with double arrows. Clicking on one of these will navigate you to the next or previous scene.
Individual entry points for the other scenes of the tour:
Details about the MRI facility and its equipment can be found on the MRI Equipment Page of the Brain Mapping Workshop site.
This virtual tour was developed by Dr. Dianne Patterson, of the Brain Imaging Center (BIC), and Tom Hicks, in the School of Information. We are grateful to the RII Sensor Lab, for the loan of several 360 cameras, and to Devin Bayly, of UITS, for providing us with example AFrame code to jumpstart our learning.
The tour is implemented using HTML, Javascript, the Bootstrap frontend toolkit, and the AFrame web framework for building 3D/AR/VR experiences. The source code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and available on GitHub.