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| Indiana University's CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment is an eight foot cube room. It is a virtual reality (VR) display theater that consists of three walls and a floor. Stereo computer images and stereo sounds fill the CAVE through a rear-screen projection system controlled by Silicon Graphics machines (SGIs) and a tracking system. The graphical scenes converge into a 3D display by wearing stereoscopic shutter glasses. |
| The tracking system updates the stereo graphics and sound according to the perspective of an active user who wears the head tracking glasses and controls a tracking wand for navigation. The display is updated in real time with the motions of active user whose head and hand positions trigger events based on the program output. |
| The CAVE is a multiple user system that can accommodate up to nine passive users. They also wear stereoscopic shutter glasses and receive a slightly altered perspective from the active user. |
| CAVE virtual reality includes the unique ability to generate imagery, view it in three dimensions and manipulate it in real time. Due to its visual and experiential nature, the CAVE theater display system lends itself well to dynamic art applicationsp; |
| The most exciting aspects of recent research is connecting CAVEs across high speed networks so that people in remote CAVEs can work together in real time withing the same environment. They are able to see one another and speak to one another through the use of advanced video and audio networking. |
| The CAVE was invented by Dan Sandin, Tom DeFanti and Carolina Cruz-Neira at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. The CAVE debuted at the SIGGRAPH conference 1992. The was commercialized and produced by Pyramid Systems, Inc. (now Fakespace Systems Inc.) |
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The Indiana University CAVE is on the
Bloomington campus in Lindley Hall. The Henry Radford Hope School of Fine
Arts has a laboratory equipped with high end SGIs, Macs, scanners and access
to mass storage facilities.
BACK to CAVE dolinsky@indiana.edu http://dolinsky.fa.indiana.edu/ |