CAVE is a modern immersive virtual reality environment, but it has its roots in ancient Greece. Namely in Plato's Republic where a philosopher contemplates reality, perception and illusion. To do so he used the allegory of the Cave. Vision of Plato presents a group of people who have been chained in a grotto for life, facing a blank wall. Their only entertainment was watching shadows which appeared projected on the wall by various things passing the light of a bonfire behind the prisoners. Over time they began to assign meanings to those blinking blurred forms. According to Plato, reality that we know is like those shadows. For us, the prisoners, it is real only what is knowable through the senses. We don’t realize that this is only a reflection of reality, the universe of genuine ideas. We live in a world of illusion to which we are accustomed so much that we have given it the status of authenticity. What did scientists from the University of Illinois at Chicago do was creation of similar alternative dimension. A dimension of virtual reality which absorbs every single user entirely. CAVE is currently the most advanced system although its official birth is dated back to 1992. The whole magic and the uniqueness of the project result from technical solutions. Construction consists of a cubical room surrounded by the net of high-resolution projectors and motion detectors. The user is equipped with special stereoscopic goggles and a joystick called the Wand. Stereo images are being projected on the walls and floor of the chamber. The principle of operation is quite simple and similar to effects obtained in cinemas or in computer games. Glasses are coupled to the display system on the monitor. Impulses for the brain are being created in the process of alternating patching the eyes and displaying images slightly shifted in relation to the previous one in order to obtain three-dimensional visions. Applied ideas allow simultaneous participation of even a few people. One of them is a head tracking system which continuously adjust the stereo projection to the current position of the leading viewer. Differently than it might seem CAVE was not created for entertainment purposes. Equipment which is necessary to launch the entire system costs as much as high-class car, so it's not surprising that the CAVE games won’t be produced for a long time or only for very exclusive amusement arcades. Cave Automatic Virtual Environment was developed by scientists and for scientists. The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) is planning to use it to study the behavior of the three-dimensional chaotic systems, while General Motors used CAVE to design new car models (check out other uses of augmented reality in the automotive industry). As a tool for the visualization of elaborated environments, it facilitates the exploration which enables understanding and evaluation of any real or abstract universe. Applied technologies ensure freedom of movement within such a simulator that includes unrestricted navigation, interaction with virtual 3-D objects and enhancement through directional sound. Total immersion into another dimension, however, still remains beyond the reach of ‘ordinary mortals’. References: -Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin, Thomas A. DeFanti, Robert V. Kenyon and John C. Hart. "The CAVE: Audio Visual Experience Automatic Virtual Environment", Communications of the ACM, vol. 35(6), 1992, pp. 64-72. DOI:10.1145/129888.129892 -Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin and Thomas A. DeFanti. "Surround-Screen Projection-based Virtual Reality: The Design and Implementation of the CAVE", SIGGRAPH'93: Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, pp. 135-142, DOI:10.1145/166117.166134
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