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Spotlight
Special Section Trend Report >> Good News
5/26/2005
to “immersive, interactive, multisensory, viewer-centered, three-dimensional, computer-generated environments and the combination of technologies required to build these environments” (Carolina Cruz-Neira, Projection-Based Virtual Reality: The CAVE and Its Applications to Computational Science. Ph.D. Thesis, University of Illinois, 1995). VR theaters immerse users in the environment they are viewing. With such theaters, users aren’t just passive observers in the computer-generated world, but are interacting with the various components of the environment in real-time. Envision’s VR Theater is a Fakespace FLEX System (www.fakespace.com), featuring three 8 x 10 foot panels for rear projection of large-scale 3D images. These movable screens can be easily and rapidly rearranged to form a semi-enclosed “room” with three walls plus a fourth panel as the floor—an arrangement that creates a 3D immersive virtual environment. The VR Theater is also equipped with a state-of-the-art tracking system that allows corrective perspective rendering and direct interaction with the virtual environment. A fivechannel speaker system in the corners of the facility adds surround-sound cues to the virtual reality environment. Depending on the task at hand, the VR Theater is driven either using a 32-processor SGI Oynx2 computer, or an 8-processor SGI Oynx4. A high-end Windows and Linux PC cluster has been added to the already powerful VR Theater.Motion Capture. In the virtual reality world, the process of recording a person’s movements or other live motion event, and converting those movements into a digital, 3D representation of the motion is called motion capture. The Envision Center houses a portable STT Motion Captor optical motion capture system composed of six infrared cameras on tripods, and as many as three linked computers. The system is operated in collaboration with the Department of Visual and Performing Arts, and is capable of capturing the movements of two people simultaneously. During the last academic year, for instance, graduate and undergraduate student groups from the Computer Graphics Technology program at Purdue used this system to produce an interactive dance performance in association with the Department of Visual and Performing Arts. A solo dancer wore the motion capture suit on stage, during the performance (see above). Data gathered from the suit was then used to create imagery which was projected onto two large screens on the stage.
Tiled Wall. The tiled display wall at the Envision Center is a 7 x 12 foot high-resolution display made up of a grid of 12 smaller projection displays controlled by many computers working together. The wall is capable of displaying 4,096 pixels horizontally and 2,304 pixels vertically, for a total of 9.4 million pixels—about five times the resolution found on a typical desktop workstation. The display system is extremely
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