University of Illinois uses a Cluster for Immersive VR

It seems the folks down at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created a 6-sided CAVE like system called ALICE. But, instead of running it off of a SGI Onyx, they've developed a distributed environment for visualization called Syzygy. Slap a few computers together and make your own holodeck!

Comments

Emersive?

[Ravagin]

Is this, like, transcendentalist VR? Far out!

Or maybe it has something to do with emery; but how a powder generally used for grinding and polishing fits into VR, I don't know.

Now I'm going to read the article.

Great!

[darkov]

This should make for some stupendous pr0n! Come on all you vouyers, start stringing those polygons together.

Sweet, but...

[Lewisham]

...why is it called ALICE? Is it a deliberate attempt to confuse people who already relate ALICE to the ALICEbot? Is ALICE simply just a very adpatable acronym? Does ALICE the acronym deserve an acronym to describe it's acronymity? Adaptable Language In Crappy English, perhaps?

Re:#include "Wry smile.h"

[Mike Connell]

Noting that this is clustering software for a *CAVE*.

1. You can't use "standard or flat monitors" in any form of "downsized setting", because unless you are 6 inches high, it's not going to be immersive. You can't stand in the cubic space formed by the faces of 6 monitors, flat or not, unless you are a person of very very small stature. Even if you can find a 6" high person to get in this contraption, they'll probably get fried by all the EM radition & heat after a few minutes, so you'll need a supply of these people...

2. Bringing up kernel.org looks like blatent karma-whoring - it's completely irrelevant. The problems you missed, and which I pointed out to you in my first post are the physical problems - you have to build an immersive space environment - a physical one - out of wood. You can't email an 12 foot high wooden structure around on the internet you know!

3. (You need a big room for this) "Unless you downsize it". Oh sure, if you can also "downsize" your users. You have to build something that you can get inside of. There's a limit to downsizing - at the limit is your body!

If you're only going to use a powerwall or something it's a different kettle of fish, and you can just hook up WireGL or something of that nature with what I expect will be a lot less effort.

So as I attempted to point out (and obviously failed) in my first post - there are real physical engineering problems that make the construction of your own CAVE environment much much harder than downloading some code and playing with the configuration files.

0.02