From: felger@igd.fhg.de (Wolfgang Felger)
Subject: EVENT: VR talk entitled "The CAVE" -- Darmstadt, Germany -- 07Dec93

        Hi everybody:

        I'm pleased to announce a talk on Virtual Reality in Darmstadt
        (Germany).  For details see appended text.

        Wolfgang

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        | Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics (IGD)            |
        | Demonstration Centre Virtual Reality                        |
        |                                                             |
        | Mr. Wolfgang Felger        | Tel.: ++49-6151-155122         |
        | Wilhelminenstr. 7          | Fax.: ++49-6151-155199         |
        | D-64283 Darmstadt, Germany | email: felger@igd.fhg.de       |
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_____________________________________________________________________________

Title:          The CAVE

Lecturer:       Carolina Cruz-Neira (EVL, EECS, UIC, Chicago, USA)

Place:  Haus der Graphischen Datenverarbeitung
        Wilhelminenstr. 7
        D-64283 Darmstadt (Germany)
        Seminarraum 1

Date:   Tuesday, Dec. 07, 1993;  Time: 09:00h - 09:30h (a.m.)

Costs:  NO (free of charge)



ABSTRACT

The most popular conception of how to explore a virtual environment is by
wearing a head mounted display (HMD) with two tiny LCDs or CRTs displays, 
one for each eye.

This presentation describes an alternative to such a system developed at
the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of
Illinois at Chicago called the CAVE.
Its name is both a recursive acronym (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment)
and a reference to "The Simile of the Cave" found in Plato's Republic, in 
which the philosopher compares one's perceptions of living in and outside a 
physical cave with two states of mind: illusion and belief.

The CAVE uses projection technology to surround the participants with virtual
worlds. The CAVE is a cube made up of three rear-projection screens for walls 
and down-projection screen for the floor; each one of the sides of the cube 
is 3.5x3.5 meters. The projectors display full color images on the CAVE sides 
as seen on the worksation screens at a rate of 120 Hz for flicker-free stereo. 

Computer controlled audio is synchronized with the visuals for sonification 
and feedback from the virtual objects and environments. Multiple speakers 
are located at the vertices of the CAVE for the perception of the audio. We 
use a traking system to determine the participants head and hand position 
to calculate the correct perspective projection and to allow interaction 
with the virtual environments. Participants wear Stereogaphics' LCD shutter 
glasses to perceive stereo. The whole system is controlled by four Silicon 
Graphics high-end workstations and a fifth workstation acts as the controller 
for the synchronization of all the devices and audio system.

This presentation describes what we know and what we have learned
from our personal experience in designing virtual environments. In the past 
three years, EVL has been dedicated to research on virtual reality. After 
creating the CAVE, we developed over twenty different experiences each one 
of them in a complete different discipline that ranges from astrophysics 
to molecular biology, from hyperbolic spaces to virtual scuba-diving, from 
brain surgery to architectural design. We will discusse our efforts to 
introduce computational scientists to the use of virtual reality as a 
reseach tool, describe the process to design virtual research environments 
from the scientific visualization tools being used by researchers, and 
discuss the adventages and shortcomings of going to virtual reality from 
already in use computer graphics applications.
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