Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City has just brought up a new CAVE Virtual Environment with the help of Christie, who is using eight Mirage 3-chip DLP projectors to generate acative stereo at 1920-square on each wall. 1920-square doesn’t sound like much, but its’ a huge step up from most CAVE’s that operate in the 1024-square range.
“The ICB’s CAVE facility is a powerful new tool that is helping us attract the best and brightest minds in the world,” remarked Dr. Harel Weinstein. “We are able to explore images at the molecular and cellular level with a clarity and precision that was previously unattainable. Images of tissues and biological objects can be twisted, turned and expanded, viewed layer by layer with the flick of the wrist, allowing for an unmatched level of inspection that engulfs researchers in colors and details.”
Of course, they can now view their medical data in higher and better resolution thanks to these new projectors from Christie.
However, if you run the numbers (based on my previous CAVE experience), at 1920 pixels on a 10-foot screen, that’s 16dpi. That means each pixel is a 16th of an inch. Given the blurriness of the active shutter glasses and the distance away that you stand (About 5 feet), that may not be noticable. I find it interesting that they chose active stereo over a nonstereo 4K projector, which would double the DPI to about 30dpi. While they don’t provide many details on what they’re doing, I would be interested to know why they chose Stereo over Higher Resolution.
Nonetheless, they do acknowledge the Pixel Density, albeit in a strange way.
Borcherding added, “Pixel density is key to visualizing the vast amount of data we need to analyze. We chose Christie because they were the only company to propose a genuine high definition CAVE solution, which no one else could offer.
Announcements like this I always treat with a bit of skepticism, since I find it hard to imagine what a 4 or 5 wall CAVE offers over a traditional flat display. Their example doesn’t help the matter much:
The facility has also used the 3D CAVE to study MRI images to successfully identify areas of the brain that are underdeveloped in children whose mothers engaged in substance abuse while pregnant. Dr. Luis Gracia, Scientific Application Specialist with the ICB, built a fully automated rendering pipeline using software from Harvard to help researchers visualize the brains of these children over time to track the development of various regions. Being able to get children in therapies sooner based on these study results can correct a large amount of the deficit that they would normally experience if not treated as quickly.
Hopefully such user-studies of how the CAVE was instrumental in discovering these brain deformities will be published in upcoming scientific visualization journals, they make for great Success Stories and Application articles. Sadly, too often are they forgotten in the ‘we got a new toy’ euphoria and obligatory tours.
via Christie’s 3D CAVE Helps Weill Cornell Medical College Deliver Breakthrough Findings.
@ Randall Hand
Ok, I misunderstood your comments in the article then. I agree that there is little use for immersive use for MRI data. The only small use I see is the easier recognition of spatial relationships.
Stereo is key to achieve immersion in a CAVE. The benefit of immersion is huge when it comes to evaluate real-size objects, e.g., in architectural design. The head tracking combined with stereo also makes judging spatial relationship much easier, since you can ‘look around’ objects.
The pixel density is standard, imo. All immersive installations I know use at least 2k, and I have seen a few with 4k per wall.
Architectural, as well as automotive, are probably the two most convincing arguments to be made for tech like CAVE. Situations where real life scale are important.
However, I’ve never seen or read any material in the usefulness if a cave in biological studies. Seems a little too “Body Tours”. I can easily see the usefulness of stereo, but not immersion in looking at MRIs.