The StarCAVE is a five-sided virtual reality (VR) room where scientific models and animations are projected in stereo on 360-degree screens surrounding the viewer, and onto the floor as well. It was constructed by the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). At less than $1 million, the StarCAVE immersive environment cost approximately the same as earlier VR systems, while offering much higher resolution and contrast.
3D STARCAVE VIRTUAL REALITY
“When you’re inside the StarCAVE the quality of the image is stunning,” said Thomas A. DeFanti, director of visualization at Calit2 and one of the pioneers of VR systems. “The StarCAVE supports 20/40 vision and the images are very high contrast, thanks to the room’s unique shape and special screens that allow viewers to use 3D polarizing glasses. You can fly over a strand of DNA and look in front, behind and below you, or navigate through the superstructure of a building to detect where damage from an earthquake may have occurred.”
The StarCAVE represents the third generation of surround-VR rooms. DeFanti’s team built and named the original Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991. The first- and second-generation CAVEs require viewers to wear battery-powered ‘shutter’ glasses; the StarCAVE provides an improved 3D experience and allows viewers to wear only lightweight, polarized ‘sun’ glasses.
The room operates at a combined resolution of over 68 million pixels – 34 million per eye – distributed over 15 rear-projected walls and two floor screens. Each side of the pentagon-shaped room has three stacked screens, with the bottom and top screens titled inward by 15 degrees to increase the feeling of immersion (while also reducing the ghosting, or ‘seeing double’, that bedevils VR systems).Because the StarCAVE is designed to help scientists, DeFanti and his team made sure to incorporate the latest in computer graphics processing .Thirty-four high-definition projectors (two per screen) create very bright left and right eye visuals, i.e. stereo or 3D, per screen. Each pair of projectors is powered by a high-end, quad-core PC running on Linux, with dual graphics processing units and dual network cards to achieve gigabit Ethernet or networking. Users of the StarCAVE can interact with the visuals on the 360-degree display – by pointing a “wand” that makes it easy to fly through the 3D images and zoom in or out. The exact position of the wand and the user is determined by a multi-camera wireless tracking system.
Among the VR room’s other features, it is wheelchair accessible, and it was designed to withstand earthquakes. One of the StarCAVE’s five walls (along with its six projectors, three screens and three computers) rolls back on steel rails to provide access for users into the space, and the wall rolls back into place to provide the full 360-degree, immersive VR experience.
While the StarCAVE was in development, computer scientists were working on new applications to adapt computer programs for display in the VR environment. The room connects to the Protein Data Bank, so users can pull up one or multiple proteins and fly around them to find similarities and differences between the proteins.
“We also created an application which displays computer-aided design models of parts of the new San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge,” said DeFanti. “The application allows users to walk/fly through these parts at their real size, to find material clashes, construction errors, and generally to draw conclusions about whether the structure could be built as designed.”
