The future of the CAVE

Abstract

The CAVE, a walk-in virtual reality environment typically consisting of 4–6 3 m-by-3 m sides of a room made of rear-projected screens, was first conceived and built in 1991. In the nearly two decades since its conception, the supporting technology has improved so that current CAVEs are much brighter, at much higher resolution, and have dramatically improved graphics performance. However, rear-projection-based CAVEs typically must be housed in a 10 m-by-10 m-by-10 m room (allowing space behind the screen walls for the projectors), which limits their deployment to large spaces. The CAVE of the future will be made of tessellated panel displays, eliminating the projection distance, but the implementation of such displays is challenging. Early multi-tile, panel-based, virtual-reality displays have been designed, prototyped, and built for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. New means of image generation and control are considered key contributions to the future viability of the CAVE as a virtual-reality device.

Analyzing Google Earth application in a heterogeneous commodity cluster display wall

“…As a consequence, this has arisen the interest of the scientific community, proposing a wide range of new cluster-based display wall platforms together with software frameworks oriented towards handling the details of synchronizing and distributing the rendering tasks across these nodes [4,21]. Current cluster display wall infrastructures include: CAVE [5], an immersive environment which simulates a cave, a room where all the walls are being projected; GeoWall [18], a set of tiled 3D displays on a solid structure making a wall; ViewDock TDW [20], a computing cluster connected to a tiled display wall used in drug discovery and Liquid Galaxy [8], a set of tiled displays forming a hemisphere to provide immersivity when running Google Earth. This fast evolution of cluster display walls, together with the commercial explosion of the thin-bezel LCD panels with built-in support for stereoscopic 3D, has presented the opportunity to build hybridreality environments, which combine the benefits of immersive virtual reality and large cluster display wall environments [28].…”

“…To bypass this problem, a cluster-based display wall is proposed, in which each screen is served by a computer. Some examples are CAVE [5] and GeoWall [18].…”

Measurements of Spectral Spatial Distribution of Scattering Materials for Rear Projection Screens used in Virtual Reality Systems

“…One of first systems was called CAVE which stands for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment. It was built at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1992 [2,3]. It consisted of a cube in "classic" configuration (Fig.1a) in which four of the walls acted as projection screens.…”

“…To achieve the best quality and "feeling" of VR, the combination of three basic elements is needed: interaction with the generated world, ability to move freely and a perception of depth. These three elements are also referred in literature as I 3 : Interaction + Immersion + Imagination [1]. All of those elements are being introduced in computer games where players can easily "sink into" their virtual world by having the ability to interact with almost every element of the displayed scene.…”

Virtual Sightseeing in Immersive 3D Visualization Lab

“…Therefore, the level of immersion is very high for CAVEs. Dozens of CAVEs have been constructed within the last twenty five years [3,5]. Some of them are rather simple and  This work was supported in part by DS Funds of the Faculty of ETI of the Gdańsk University of Technology.…”