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What is a CAVE Good For?
ynakai asks: "Today, I had the fortune to be allowed to play with demo applications in a CAVE.
This technology is stunning, but what is the killer app? A staffer said that despite the potential use as a teaching tool for medical students, the system is rarely used now except by digital artists (who admittedly create some stunning experiences - try the VRML versions of some).
Surely Slashdot can think up better ways to make use of a multimillion dollar room of fully immersive 3D interaction, besides FPS games?"
What it will wind up being used for, as with every other computer technology, is solitare and porn.
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The first obvious answer is pr0n.
Driver education would probably be a good use.
You would only need to cover the passenger compartment windows with screens.
Of course the animatronic backseat driving mother-inlaw could drive up costs
and the suicide rate.
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Better, yeah probably, but cooler, I dunno. Also, if you were a nerd in charge of coming up with idea for applying this technology, and it was already paid for, why on earth would you give up the best gaming rig on the planet. I'm sure there are a lot of great ideas, but everyone is afraid of losing their UT03K "test lab".
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imagine these things are phone booths. you and a friend can sit in a room together and chat from across the country. for $5 a minute. ;) hehehehh
In Soviet Redmond, software programs you!
There simply isn't anything about using spreadsheets or word processors today that is enjoyable. They are the epitome of redundancy and boredom.
Taking these to the 3rd dimension and immersive could make the profession of accountant and secretary more attractive to young college graduates.
Second Life.
fully-immersive pr0n
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Where have the CAVE people been getting their funding from? Surely they've applied for DARPA money. Battle field visualization is the obvious use for this technology.. as is air traffic control.
How we know is more important than what we know.
My company, CEI, Inc., makes a product called EnSight that's used in CAVE environments. EnSight is a general purpose scientific visualization tool used in a broad variety of fields. Take a look at the pretty pictures on our website. Fields include astrophysics, professional motorsports, crash test simulations, industrial production simulation, biomedical, aerospace vehicle design, etc. Really high end visualization happens in a CAVE environment with 3-D goggles and head tracking equipment. This lets you move around through your simulation, look at things from different perspectives and even look from inside out. Most of these things are driven by big SGI boxes, but clustered (read linux) solutions are becoming more viable.
EnSight -- See what you're missing! (Please mod accordingly for cheese content.)
It's not a bad thing to have around when you want to wow somebody...
Then when you finally disconnect (say, after a week) for food or something, people will ask you questions about the news and when you're dumb founded cause you havn't watched tv in a week they can say "have you been living in a cave or what?" and you can say "actually, yes I have!"
How we know is more important than what we know.
you can download a vrml plugin here:
http://ca.com/cosmo/
From working with a CAVE enviroment in a research lab for 2 years, I came to the simple conclussion that other than for developing and utilizing some custom 3D (with immersive stereo glasses, head tracking etc.) applications, and showing off your work on a big screen (with 3D of course).
There is a definate wow factor to it that helps in promoting the research, but for the most part it becomes stale fast.
Another shameless plug here, a custom math visualization system I spent quite a while in the development with: http://mvs.sourceforge.net/
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"I used to be an idealist, but I got mugged by reality."
I can think of a lot of answers, but they all involve high market penetration.
Who would have guess that computers would someday be used for Instant Messaging in the 1970's? First computers have to be cheap, then penetrate the market, then get hooked up, then the software be developed, etc. I can imagine immersive setups or MMORPGs or really useful collaboration tools or all kinds of other things that require a lot of people to own the hardware or a lot more bandwidth.
Basically, if you imagine technology as a tree, CAVE is probably a dead-end stub, where a nearby branch will end up taking off and strangling the CAVE approach, probably a branch that has a much lower hardware cost. (Think digital glasses that track movement and virtually project a room; much cheaper, much easier to make useable by the 'common man' since it doesn't eat cubic feet for lunch, easier to make useful intermediate steps.)
It is not useless but until there's one in a few million homes the commercial apps aren't going to take off, and fully enclosed environments are just prohibitive in so many ways for so many people. CAVE is a great research project, don't think I'm "knocking" it, but, well, I can't think of any killer app that came from a lab. (Xerox PARC developments subsequently used by Apple don't damage that claim, they re-inforce it; until Apple repackaged it out of a lab environment GUIs were dead. Not to mention GUI isn't really intrinsically a killer app, desktop-publishing was.) Part of the reason is the fact that until we use it, we don't recognize the killer app, and few people if any can guess it in advance (which, incidentally, does mean the Ask Slashdot as asked is basically unanswerable, historically speaking).
Until we have hackers (old sense of the word) hacking on it, the killer app won't happen.
.. my company has a spherical video camera whose format would translate very well to the CAVE system. Can't tell you about practical applications here, but I can tell you at least that the technology to have it use real video, not just CG video, might be interesting to somebody out there.
"Derp de derp."
what, that needs to be spelled out any further? I don't think so.
However, why not? Now, remember that Kinkos used to flog (and I guess they still do, but am too lazy to check their website) their videoconferencing facilities, before webcams and voip were as common as they are now.
With a CAVE, you set up across the street a competing shop with a name like, oh, "Kinkies," and flog yours instead. ("Come view our womb imagery. Sugar walls, four of 'em. Have you ever been surrounded by porn? You will.")
I think the "killer app" is being able to walk through a building that is just plans, before construction starts. Or to walk around a large object that is still in plans (eg. a plane or car) to see how it will turn out. Yeah, there's regular 3d render software that you can do this with on a small scale, but to do it life-size is something else. Especially with architectural plans.
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Stellar Cartography.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
caveQuake
The guy that did that work is one of the princples of Visbox, a company that does high end displays. They were at Siggraph this past year.
Movie theaters
VCRs
Pay TV
The Internet
i.e. Basically all forms of rich media transmission. Do not dismiss porn as a venue to sell your new technology. It truly could be very helpful.
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The crew I work for makes some pretty flash software for visualising oil and gas reservoirs in 3D in an immersive environment. It's not exactly the same as a CAVE, but we have variously used active/passive stereo and domes in the past to achieve pretty much that same effects (I'm sure it would work in a real CAVE too).
It never ceases to draw the "oohs and ahhs" from customers. The thing is, they actually find it useful, not just as some pretty eye candy. I guess you'd want to for the price of that SGI Onyx and the Barco projection system required to run it.
Studying France? Take a class trip to Paris. OK, so that's too expensive, but if you can get the kids to a local CAVE they can get the walking tour and a good feel for the city.
:)
The missing bit of technology would be something that could interpolate between QTVR nodes in a scene, to allow for arbitrary motion. Yeah, that's hard, but there are few motivators as enticing as cool hardware.
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Halliburton recently bought a company here in Houston called magic earth.
They have a nice dome shaped cave for 3D oil exploration.
too bad the idiots don't have a larger picture on their website.
All that oil money buys some really cool toys.
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Shelter, duh.
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> What is a CAVE Good For?
Ask OBL; he's lived in one for the past two years.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Another application I can think of is exploratory data analysis (or data mining if you prefer). You can have multiple visualizations of a large data set floating around and even go into the data. The thing is that humans are very good a pattern recogniction (though sometimes even when there are none) and CAVE could be used to exploit this in science.
It's probably vast overkill, but 3d systems frequently don't lend themselves to 2d visualization that well. Take, say, a building's power system. Sure, you could pop it on someone's computer with a 3d card, but computer input devices aren't anywhere near as nice to use as actually moving over to what you want to look at.
It might be interesting in computer vision -- you can actually produce an environment to desired specifications (or over a gradient of worsening conditions) to test in.
Commercial 3d virtual tourism?
May we never see th
I've heard of immersive environments being used to cure certain phobias. Acrophobia, in particular, was "curable" with a few treatments in a VR environment. An immersive interactive environment can be used to let people play out/explore/explain out their anxieties...
What is a CAVE Good For?
How cool would Batman be without it?
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The CAVE is a projection based virtual reality system developed at the Electronic Visualization Lab; it was created by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Dan Sandin, and Tom DeFanti, along with other students and staff of EVL.
Staff of EVL? Boy does that lend itself to typo abuse.
The Ars Electronica Center in Linz has a CAVE installation. I had the chance to use it on a guided tour. Graphic quality was not too great, esp. when compared with todays FPS, but the experience was really cool!
I'd say the main areas of use for a CAVE system are design and construction, for example cars or houses. Anything that needs to been seen with the spatial component but is too expensive to build as a prototype. Just imagine building a house and then having to tear it down again because in the computer room you couldn't place the surround speakers correctly...
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For a lot of applications headsets are probably better. When I tried the CAVE here I was blown away by the immersion, to the extent that I bashed into the wall. And that's the connundrum at the heart of the thing - if you have something so immersive, that allows you to turn around and look at the virtual environment, many uses you might have for it would involve walking. Effectively you have something halfway between 3 (rotations) and 6 (rotations + translations) degrees of freedom - you *can* translate but not far enough to do much with. A headset with a long wire gives you much more range and you can do walk-around stuff.
A very simple application that should be simple to write is a simulation of Flatland. See firsthand what it's like to move and interact while immersed in a 2D environment.
Another fun thing would be flying! Without a plane, of course, the way Superman or the Flying Nun used to do it. In the spirit of Douglas Adams, you'd start off by throwing yourself at the ground and missing.
It also shouldn't be hard to arrange a walking tour for architecture students through a city that includes hundreds of architecturally significant buildings, from reconstructed versions of Rome's Colloseum and Circus Maximus to the Guggenheim and the World Trade Center.
And then there's that first-person version of "Being John Malkovich" to consider...
Until the games industry starts branching out into other occupations other than "lone military man behind enemy lines," driver (usually race but they are branching now alittle), pilot, or sports, then you won't find alot of use for it. What we need are games like crime scene detective, archaeologists (other than Indy).
Most outdoor type of work though would be alot cheaper performed outside somewhere. The advantage of a CAVE system is that you could have a standardized model that everyone practices or tests on though. Alot of information can be lost if artifacts aren't recovered and recorded properly. It could help for randomized digs to get proper record keeping pounded into the students heads. Sort of like how CS 1 Professors were trying to pount Hex and Binary math into our heads. Without practice, most skills fade and get lost.
Surely Slashdot can think up better ways to make use of a multimillion dollar room of fully immersive 3D interaction . . .
I started to reach for the keyboard at this point, but then:
. . . besides FPS games?
D'oh! Well, if you're going to add that little proviso, then no, I can't think of anything . . .
I've always thought the ideal development environment would be a virtual chamber.
Most IDEs and editors feel visually constraining. (Think how useful your desk would truly be if you had to interact with it through a 12x13 hole.
I want the complete document in front of me, with another complete document sitting right next to it. (I actually used to print out code, lay it out on the floor, and debug with a pencil.
Big wraparound projection screens provide a much better effect than the cube of flat screens. The CAVE approach only looks right from one viewpoint anyway, so you may as well use a wraparound screen in front of a desk.
The problem with trading anything is the vast arrange of variables - current actual holdings, hedges, debt, tax, cost-of-carry - which can all vary depending on the variety and type of security/commodity.
Make an app where you can see it all and manipulate (via hooks to a trading to trading system/spreadsheet/e-trade) everything and you are on a winner - even 0.1% increase in profitability matters when you do a lot of trades
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