Commercial Game Technology for Low Cost Panoramic Immersive
Displays
COTS Multiscreen Displays
Commercial Game Technology
for Low Cost Panoramic Immersive Displays
Jacobson, J., Lewis M.,
Sycara, K
October 2002
http;//planetjeff.net
Immersive multiscreen displays
can be assembled from Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS)
components at very low cost and remarkably high performance. For
example, a $1000 PC may be equipped with a $1000 graphics card capable
of drawing 54 million triangles per second (i.e. the Nvidia Quadro4
750).
This particular PC-based cave
design takes advantage of the graphically powerful and inexpensive
game engine used in Unreal Tournament (UT). Unreal Tournament
is partially open source and supports rapid authoring of visually rich
virtual worlds, complex animations, alternative physics and artificial
intelligence. It also supports multi-user shared virtual environments
networked via the internet or any standard LAN.
Figure 1:
Schematic of a two-walled immersive display. CaveUT allows up to 32
screens.
Figure 2: A
Two-Walled UT-Cave showing the interior of a virtual fortress. The
components are lightweight and low cost—the whole thing fits into
standard airline luggage for one person.
Figure 3:
CaveUT is used to display Virtual Ancient Egypt (VAE) in the Earth
Theater of the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh. It has five Screens in a
210-degree arc. VAE was built first in WTK, translated to VRML, then
to UT format.
To display a single UT
environment across multiple screens requires the freeware
modification, CaveUT. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the simplest
possible design: two screens, front-projected, mounted on a
lightweight portable frame. However, a single display can have any
number of screens, each in any orientation to the viewer. Each screen
requires a PC, a digital projector, a user license for UT ($15) and a
network connection. Figure 3 illustrates a five-screen display.
This technology lacks many of
the features found in a traditional CAVE™, but that will change with
further development, and it is still useful for many applications.
CaveUT is an entirely open-source effort. Full instructions on how to
configure the software, hardware and a two-walled starter display are
at http://planetjeff.net
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