UIC-2011-078 – CAVE2 (TM) System

Increasingly, the Nation’s computational science and engineering research communities work with international collaborators to tackle complex global problems. Just as NSF cyberinfrastructure provides better access to greater volumes and varieties of data – from data storage systems, online instrumentation and/or major computational resources like the TeraGrid and future Petascale Facilities – advanced visualization instruments serve as the eyepieces of a telescope or microscope, enabling researchers to view their data in cyberspace, and better manage the increased scale and complexity of accessing and analyzing the data. The CAVE2 (TM) system is such an eyepiece, providing researchers with powerful and easy-to-use information-rich instrumentation in support of cyberinfrastructure-enabled scientific discovery. The CAVE2 system will provide users with the ability to see 3D stereoscopic content in a nearseamless environment with approximately 53 Megapixels of resolution, and 2D content at nearly 106 Megapixels. Unique to the CAVE2 (TM) system is that it will provide an alternative approach to constructing a CAVE (TM) system by using new near-seamless flat LCD technology augmented with micropolarization, rather than traditional projection technologies. The net effect is that the next generation virtual environment system–CAVE2 (TM)–has a 3D acuity to match human vision, can be scaled near-seamlessly to even greater resolution, is affordable compared to projection-based approaches, requires little maintenance, can be used for both 2D and 3D stereoscopic viewing, and can support multiple simultaneous viewers. Mark Krivchenia krivchen@otm.uic.edu (312) 996-6626