I always look at these systems and think there’s no possible way they’ll ever go mainstream, but looking at this amazing conglomeration of kit bringing the new Battlefield 3 game to life is truly jawdropping.
Centred on the worlds first, portable omni-directional treadmill designed by Swedish company MSE Weibull the simulator lets you control the movements of a Battlefield 3 character with your own body. Other key technology employed includes: 12 paintball markers that allow the player, in real time, to feel the enemy gunfire experienced in the game; a wireless gun system; ambient LED lighting; and an Xbox Kinect camera hack.
No idea how much something like this cost, but something tells me there’s a lot of bubblegum and duct tape holding this one together. Nonetheless, it is awesome.
One of the few areas left where immersive environments like the CAVE still are useful, other than as a tour stop, is in the field of Architectural Visualization. Today at 4pm, Texas A&M’s Langford Architecture Center will be holding a grant opening of their newest immersive environment: An impressive 12-screen curved wall with support for most mainstream BIM tools like RevIt.
The new 12-display array, realized by a $50,000 gift from the Department of Construction Science Industry Advisory Council, is the second version of the immersive visualization system. The first iteration, a three-screen setup, was created with discretionary funds from the College of Architecture.
Kang said the new facility has already captured the attention of two construction companies engaged in campus building projects that wish to use the BIM CAVE for coordination meetings with subcontractors.
The new centerpiece of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute’s (HHI) Tomorrow’s Immersive Media Experience Lab (TIME Lab) is a huge 7 megapixel 180-degree display 12 meters wide driven by 7 of projectiondesign’s F32 DLP projectors.
“The aim of this installation is to allow digital film experts and famous film directors such as Tom Tykwer, to dive into and discover the fascination of digital cinema projection and video systems, evolving scripts and global economic challenges. At the event visitors will be treated to a true multi-media environment that offers full acoustic and visual experience of live event broadcasting and a range of novel film formats. Our projection system is designed for the future and the fantastic image quality of the projectiondeisgn projectors has made the display the centrepiece of the HHI TiME Lab,” says Christian Weissig from the Image Processing Department at the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in Berlin, Germany.
In particular I love the construction of the reflection panels on the ceiling, the projectors are mounted in a half-circle pointed downwards with reflectors, all shown in the pictures. The official launch is this Friday, but you can see several pictures of the installation at their site. Full press release after the break.
Update 2/28/10: Corrected a misspelling of Weissig’s name.
CAVE’s have been around for a while, but are quickly being replaced with newer, cheaper, faster technology. The King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) is deploying several new visualization technologies, including today’s unveiling of the “world’s most advanced visualization facility” which is opening today. MechDyne gets credit for building their flagship installation, a massive VL6 they constructed, bringing a massive 100-million pixels and 10,000 lumens of data to your environment. In addition they’ve got 24 Quad-HD projectors running at4096x2160 each, and a multi-purpose room with a 32 million pixel digital cinema projection system that enables stereoscopic viewing for 75 people.
IEEE Spectrum has a reporter on-site viewing the impressive work Saudia Arabia has done in becoming a leader in the large visualization space:
I’m attending the inauguration ceremonies this week and got a quick tour of some of the university’s laboratories, including the supercomputer and the clean room. From my perspective, if you’ve seen one clean room, you’ve seen them all. What did draw my attention were the visualization labs, which are using Shaheen’s computing power to add a visual dimension to large data sets. The first example I’m posting here is of a visualization of the human brain, where researchers are attempting to trace how signals travel between different regions by mapping the flow of water through the brain.
You can read up on the KAUST facility at their website, and you can see video of the KAUST installations & the visualization of the human brain (mentioned) in the YouTube video after the break.
Jody Strausser is an assistant professor of modeling and simulation at TCC, Tidewater Community College, where he was invited to setup a two-year program specializing in computer modeling. He quickly realized that they needed a good visualization lab for it to be effective, and with tiled-displays being all the rage he begun to look into costly projectors to build an immersive full-scale visualization system.
Strausser, instead, went with Mersive Technologies’ Mersive Desktop, which combines the images from three off-the-shelf projectors (TCC’s are from Canon) into one large, seamless image. The program is run from a desktop or laptop computer, and it can project any content that can run on the computer. The trick, though, is that Mersive Desktop uses its own software and a camera to calibrate the images, reading specific feedback patterns from the projectors, feeding the information to Mersive’s server software, and the software automatically aligns the projectors (in the software). It basically tells the computer how to “stitch” the projector outputs together to form a large, seamless display.
But what are the benefits of this large 27-foot screen?
Strausser said that when viewing modeling and simulation projects on a small computer screen, it is easy to overlook some of the details. With the large screen, students realize their work will be seen by the entire class, so they want their work to be precise. “With projection, students who created a tank, for example, may see that the tank is actually floating above the ground. On a 27-foot screen, those details really stick out.”
Over the last several years, Tiled Displays have slowly transitioned from costly blended-projection systems to LCD walls. The LCD walls are typically cheaper to build and maintain, but the bezels are a common source of complaints. Two visualization professors at Texas A&M University are finally going to settle the debate between the two technologies to see if there really is any perceivable benefit to one vs the other.
McNamara and Parke are in the right place to do the research, they say. Texas A&M’s Halbouty Geosciences Building houses the Immersive Visualization Center (IVC), a 25-foot by 8-foot curved screen that uses three rear projectors to provide a seamless display. The IVC provides advanced visualization capabilities to researchers at Texas A&M through its capability to display images of very large datasets from disciplines such as geophysics, life and physical sciences, engineering and architecture. During the study, in addition to showing test subjects the IVC’s seamless images, the researchers will use the IVC’s software to introduce seams into the images measuring .75, 1.25 and 2.50 inches wide.
“We want to ascertain if the physical presence of seams actually aids performance,” said McNamara. The researchers will be able to compare any differences viewers experience with the 1.25-inch virtual seams test subjects encounter on the IVC display.
If their hypothesis is proven correct, researchers and educators in many fields, said McNamara, can proceed with the knowledge that using the far more affordable flat-panel screen system will provide viewers with the same experience as the high-end, seamless displays.
I look forward to seeing the results when the study is finished. Read the full announcement after the break.
If you’re near Kolkata City in India sometime in the near future, you might want to check out the Science City Bypass address. They are in the process of installing an immersive “edutainment” system to create immersive environment recreations of such spectacles as Mt Everest, the moon, and the Amazon Rainforest.
It is in this hall that the 3D Immersive Visualization Facility will be installed. “This is a technology that makes a virtual situation feel real. For instance in the Mt Everest programme the situation around you will be set in such a mode that you will actually feel you are standing on top of the world s tallest peak “
IDEO Labs has developed a completely new technology that looks like a viable replacement for Mechdyne’s cave. Built with $600,000 of projector equipment and a 10x10x10 white room, it creates a fully immersive environment for a user equipped with nothing but a featherweight headset.
The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.
I always look at these systems and think there’s no possible way they’ll ever go mainstream, but looking at this amazing conglomeration of kit bringing the new Battlefield 3 game to life is truly jawdropping.
One of the few areas left where immersive environments like the CAVE still are useful, other than as a tour stop, is in the field of Architectural Visualization. Today at 4pm, Texas A&M’s Langford Architecture Center will be holding a grant opening of their newest immersive environment: An impressive 12-screen curved wall with support for most mainstream BIM tools like RevIt.
The new centerpiece of the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute’s (HHI) Tomorrow’s Immersive Media Experience Lab (TIME Lab) is a huge 7 megapixel 180-degree display 12 meters wide driven by 7 of 
CAVE’s have been around for a while, but are quickly being replaced with newer, cheaper, faster technology. The King Abdullah University of Science & Technology (KAUST) is deploying several new visualization technologies, including today’s unveiling of the “world’s most advanced visualization facility” which is opening today. MechDyne gets credit for building their flagship installation, a massive VL6 they constructed, bringing a massive 100-million pixels and 10,000 lumens of data to your environment. In addition they’ve got 24 Quad-HD projectors running at4096x2160 each, and a multi-purpose room with a 32 million pixel digital cinema projection system that enables stereoscopic viewing for 75 people.
Jody Strausser is an assistant professor of modeling and simulation at TCC, Tidewater Community College, where he was invited to setup a two-year program specializing in computer modeling. He quickly realized that they needed a good visualization lab for it to be effective, and with tiled-displays being all the rage he begun to look into costly projectors to build an immersive full-scale visualization system.
Over the last several years, Tiled Displays have slowly transitioned from costly blended-projection systems to LCD walls. The LCD walls are typically cheaper to build and maintain, but the bezels are a common source of complaints. Two visualization professors at Texas A&M University are finally going to settle the debate between the two technologies to see if there really is any perceivable benefit to one vs the other.
VizWorld.com 
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