The MiniCAVE - A Voice-Controlled IPT Environment
Edward J. Wegman, Jürgen Symanzik, Joel Vandersluis, Luo Qiang, Fernando E. Camelli, Antoinette Dzubay, Xiaodong Fu, E. A. Moustafa, Robert L. Wall, Ying Zhu · 1999
The computer hardware for the CAVE and similar immersive projectiontechnology (IPT) virtual reality (VR) environments are normally high-end Silicon Graphics systems with expensive CRT-based projection systems. The idea behind the MiniCAVE concept is to downscale the computing hardware to fast PCs running Windows NT and to downscale the projection systems to relatively inexpensive and relatively robust LCD projection systems. Much to our surprise, when we started this project in early 1998, the performance of a 200 megahertz Pentium Pro (at $3,000) was competitive with the performance of an SGI Onyx RE2 (at $120,000) when running matrix-oriented mathematics software. This suggested that a much cheaper version of the CAVE might be assembled using Pentium II hardware. Currently, we are working with a PC that has two 466 megahertz processors. Also, both resolution and frame rates of LCD-type projectors have improved substantially during the last few years. Brightness already is substantially better than CRT systems. This makes the development of an IPT environment, the MiniCAVE, based on PC