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a b s t r a c tA room-sized, walk-in virtual reality (VR) display is to a typical computer screen what a supercomputer is to a laptop computer. It is a vastly more complex system to design, house, optimize, make usable, and maintain. 17 years of designing and implementing room-sized ''CAVE'' VR systems have led to significant new advances in visual and audio fidelity. CAVEs are a challenge to construct because their hundreds of constituent components are mostly adapted off-the-shelf technologies that were designed for other uses. The integration of these components and the building of certain critical custom parts like screens involve years of research and development for each new generation of CAVEs. The difficult issues and compromises achieved and deemed acceptable are of keen interest to the relatively small community of VR experimentalists, but also may be enlightening to a broader group of computer scientists not familiar with the barriers to implementing virtual reality and the technical reasons these barriers exist.The StarCAVE, a 3rd-generation CAVE, is a 5-wall plus floor projected virtual reality room, operating at a combined resolution of ∼68 million pixels, ∼34 million pixels per eye, distributed over 15 rear- • to increase immersion, while reducing stereo ghosting. The non-depolarizing, wear-resistant floor screens are lit from overhead. Digital audio sonification is achieved using surround speakers and wave field synthesis, while user interaction is provided via a wand and multi-camera, wireless tracking system.

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The use of virtual environments (VE) for many research and commercial purposes relies on its ability to generate environments that faithfully reproduce the physical world. However, due to its limitations the VE can have a number of flaws that adversely affect its use and believability. One of the more important aspects of this problem is whether the size of an object in the VE is perceived as it would be in the physical world. One of the fundamental phenomena for correct size is sizeconstancy, that is, an object is perceived to be the same size regardless of its distance from the observer. This is in spite of the fact that the retinal size of the object shrinks with increasing distance from the observer. We examined sizeconstancy in the CAVE and found that size-constancy is a strong and dominant perception in our subject population when the test object is accompanied by surrounding environmental objects. Furthermore, size-constancy changes to a visual angle performance (i.e., object size changed with distance from the subject) when these surrounding objects are removed from the scene. As previously described for the physical world, our results suggest that it is necessary to provide surrounding objects to aid in the determination of an object's depth and to elicit size-constancy in VE. These results are discussed regarding their implications for viewing objects in projection-based VE and the environments that play a role in the perception of object size in the CAVE.

CAVERN, the CAVE Research Network, is an alliance of industrial and research institutions equipped with CAVE-based virtual reality hardware and high-performance computing resources, interconnected by high-speed networks, to support collaboration in design, education, engineering, and scientific visualization.CAVERNsoft is the collaborative software backbone for CAVERN. CAVERNsoft uses distributed data stores to manage the wide range of data volumes (from a few bytes to several terabytes) that are typically needed for sustaining collaborative virtual environments. Multiple networking interfaces support customizable, latency, data consistency, and scalability that are needed to support a broad spectrum of networking requirements. These diverse database and networking requirements are characteristics typically unexhibited by previous desktop multimedia systems but are common in real-time immersive virtual reality applications.

The CAVE, a walk-in virtual reality environment typically consisting of 4–6 3 m-by-3 m sides of a room made of rear-projected screens, was first conceived and built in 1991. In the nearly two decades since its conception, the supporting technology has improved so that current CAVEs are much brighter, at much higher resolution, and have dramatically improved graphics performance. However, rear-projection-based CAVEs typically must be housed in a 10 m-by-10 m-by-10 m room (allowing space behind the screen walls for the projectors), which limits their deployment to large spaces. The CAVE of the future will be made of tessellated panel displays, eliminating the projection distance, but the implementation of such displays is challenging. Early multi-tile, panel-based, virtual-reality displays have been designed, prototyped, and built for the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) in Saudi Arabia by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. New means of image generation and control are considered key contributions to the future viability of the CAVE as a virtual-reality device.