CAVE2™: Hybrid Reality Open House

I did told you about an Open House of the Next-Generation of Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) CAVE2™ Hybrid Reality Environment about a month ago.

Since I live in Chicago, I did signed up for the event on April 3. And I want to share this experience to those who may be interested in this technology. It was quite an experience for me to be able to immerse into the virtual worlds with CAVE2™, the new high-end technology.
Thanks to Electronic Visualization Lab. that allows us to access to CAVE2™.

There is another CAVE2™ Open House on April 24, 2013. If you are available and if you are in Chicago vicinity, you should come. I recommended it.
Here is a link if you like to know more about CAVE2™ Hybrid Reality Environment,
or watch the video of the CAVE2™ here.

CAVE2™ Brief Summary
(Source: http://www.evl.uic.edu/core.php?mod=4&type=1&indi=424)

Before the existing of CAVE2™ there was the original Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE).
Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) pioneered the development of the CAVE virtual-reality system (1992)
Classic CAVEs are virtual-reality rooms with stereoscopic 3D computer graphics rear-projected onto the walls and down-projected onto the floor, with the dimension of 10x10x10-foot room within a room, with a resolution of 4 Megapixels and was commercialized at a cost of about $1M.
The classic CAVE immerses people into any possible worlds, real or imaginary, simple or complex to be viewed otherwise.

And now come the next-generation large-scale virtual-reality environment CAVE2™.
CAVE2™ is also developed by the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a renowned interdisciplinary research laboratory that design and develop the classic CAVE virtual-reality system.

Here is the CAVE2™ specification:
- approximately 24 feet in diameter and 8 feet tall
- consists of 72 near-seamless passive stereo off-axis-optimized 3D LCD panels
- 36-node high-performance computer cluster
- 20-speaker surround audio system
- 10-camera optical tracking system
- 100-Gigabit/second connection to the outside world
- displays 320-degree panoramic environment at 37 Megapixels in 3D or 74 Megapixels in 2D with a horizontal visual acuity of 20/20
- almost 10 times the 3D resolution of the original CAVE.
- a hybrid system that combines the benefits of both scalable-resolution display walls and virtual-reality systems to create a seamless 2D/3D environment that supports both information-rich analysis as well as virtual-reality simulation exploration at a resolution matching human visual acuity.

Rebar Demo: A visit into the concrete slab to see if the rebars is properly designed and calculated before it is built.