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

Re:roll your own

[Anonymous Coward]

The Cornell Theory Center (www.tc.cornell.edu)
has a 3-wall cave setup that uses 3 off the shelf dell workstations running w2k and software from vrco.com. Seems to Just Work; I played quake on it a couple months ago.

Re:Yeah, but the SGI-based CAVE is expeeeensive!

[Anonymous Coward]

...synchronizing the output of several 3d cards? Looks like they did it!)

And they were not the first one

Iowa State's Immersive Environments

[john@iastate.edu]

ISU has probably the premier researcher in this area, Dr. Carolina Cruz-Neira. Here's some info on the environments at ISU: C6 and more...

Stereo options

[Elazro]

Unfortunately, you can not use 6 LCD projectors if you want to view stereo. There are two options for stereo viewing that are considered: passive and active stereo. The latter requires special shutter glasses (which come in prices of $20 to $600), and the former just requires simple polarized glasses like you get at a 3D Imax.

However, LCD projectors can not do active stereo. The projector displays the left eye view and the right eye view sequentially, and the active glasses (which must be somehow synchronized to the projector) block the right and left eyes sequentially. So at any given time, one eye is viwing an image, and the other sees pure black. If the refresh rate is too low, then the stereo starts to become flickery. And uncomfortable to the eyes. You can view stereo with a 60Hz display, but for most people, five minutes is about all they can stand. At 96Hz, one can view stereo comfortably for quite a while. 120 hz is even nicer.

From what I understand, LCD panels can't achieve these speeds (something to do with the energy requirements, and especially the cooling requirements, going up exponentially with Hz) One can use CRT projectors, or DLP projectors (I saw such a CAVE at EVL in Chicago, birthplace of the original CAVE)

With passive stereo, LCD's can be used - basically you just shine 2 projectors fitted with polarized filters at each screen, spend about a week aligning everything, and you're ready to go (special lenses may be needed so that alignment can actually succeed)

Now, there actually are some other options - the least interesting one is anaglyphic stereo (red/blue glasses). We'll let that one slide.

However, many new auto-stereoscopic technologies (glasses-less) are being developed.

There is lenticular - based on the same principle as those doodads you used to get in cereal boxes, where the picture would change when you rotated the thing. Now those things only had 2 images, and you had to rotate it 30 degrees to change the image. But you can make 'em so fine that each eye sees a different image. Put a display behind it, and you have autostereo. see here

One of the funkiest methods I've heard of being tried is to use pupil tracking. To understand this, you need to know that the eye is a very low resolution 'camera' for the most part. However, in the dead center of the retina, there is an extremely dense set of receptors called the fovea. It covers only about 1-2 degrees of arc, and this is where your eye picks up pretty much all of the detail.

Now, if you use pupil tracking (which can be done without the viewer having to wear any special equipment), then you can determine the region of the screen each eye's fovea is covering, and draw the corresponding image there. I haven't found an online reference to this yet, but I think it's a cool, if not a little difficult, solution to autostereo.

-matt