Use the game, Unreal Tournament 2004 as a powerful software platform for CAVEs and other multiscreen immersive displays. CaveUT 2004 is a set of software modifications, free and open source, which makes this possible. Older versions are still available: CaveUT 2003 v1.0 and CaveUT 1.2
Cavazza, M., Lugrin, J. L., Hartly, S., Renard, M. L., Nandi, A., Jacobson, J., Crooks, S. (2005). Intelligent Virtual Environments for Virtual Reality Art. Computers and Graphics 29(6): 852-861. PDF
Jacobson, J., Lewis, L. (2005i). Game Engine Virtual Reality With CaveUT. IEEE Computer, 38, 79-82. PDF HTML
Jacobson, J., Rendard, M. L., Lugrin, J. L., Cavazza, M. (2005a). The CaveUT System: Immersive Entertainment Based on a Game Engine. ACM SIGCHI International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE 2005), Valencia, Spain, June 27-July 2. Original long version in PDF format
Jacobson, J., Kelley, M., Ellis, S., Seethaler, L. (2005c) Immersive Displays for Education Using CaveUT. World Conference on Educational Multimedia Hypermedia & Telecommunications, Montreal, Canada, June 27-July 2. PDF
Jacobson, J., Hwang, Z., (2002) Unreal Tournament for Immersive Interactive Theater, in Lewis, C., Jacobson, J. (2002) Game Engines for Scientific Research, Communications of the ACM, January 2002. PDF
Lewis, M., Jacobson, J. (2002). Game Engines In Scientific Research. Communications of the ACM, 45, 27-31. PDF
Use the game, Unreal Tournament 2004 as a powerful software platform for single-projector spherical displays. Suresh Balu at Elumens Corporation adapted VRGL to use their freely distributed SPIClops API for spherical projection. Currently, DomeUT/SphereVRGL has been installed on an Elumens' Vision Station. It is also installed in one of the prototype portable domes being designed by the Immersive Earth project. DomeUT/SphereVRGL is sponsored, in part, by the elumenati, designers and consultants of immersive spherical displays. Our thanks to the ETC's Interactive Dome Project team for their help with testing. To prove it works, you can see a movie of Inner Sanctuary of the Virtual Egyptian Temple or another movie of D'nardo tearing around the holy place blowing things up.
VRGL by Willem de Jonge
VRGL is a modified OpenGL library which allows the user/programmer to introduce an off-axis projection effect into the display of any OpenGL application. It exists as a compliled library, (a *.dll file in Windows) which masqurades as the standard OpenGL library the application normally uses. VRGL intercepts the application's OpenGL calls, introduces needed changes, and passes the requests on to the true OpenGL library. CaveUT and DomeUT depend critically on VRGL.
This is a hypothetical Egyptian temple, built from respectable sources. It is free to the public for educational and other non-commercial purposes. To use it, you will need a standard PC or MAC with these minimum specificiations. Next, buy and install a copy of Unreal Tournament 2004. Then download the 35meg file, DM-Horus102i.zip, open it, and follow the directions in the README.TXT file where you will also find a long list of credits.
with the virtual Egyptian Temple is now showing at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh for group tours, such as children's school groups. We are especially grateful to the students at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, who have made the most recent contributions to the Temple.
Jacobson, J., Holden, L. (2005e). The Virtual Egyptian Temple. World Conference on Educational Media, Hypermedia & Telecommunications (ED-MEDIA), Montreal, Canada. PDF
In 1993 I we built the first version, which showed at the Guggenheim in 1994 in an exhibit of artwork employing new technology, and has been improved upon ever since. See the old credits page Most recently, Jason Yates rebuilt the VRML version, making it light and efficient. It is free to public for educational and non-commericial purposes. To view the temple you need to install a VRML plug-in for your web browser. For the PC, I reccommend the free player at Octagon, but Cortona and BS Contact VRML work too. MAC users should definitely use Cortona. Linux users should try FreeWRL or OpenVRML Lookat. Amazingly, Cosmo still works for MAC and PC, but it is just too old to work well anymore. Once your VRML viewer is installed, simply click here, or download the whole thing as a ZIP file.
Frightfully detailed instructions on how to construct a PC-based cave for roughly $5000 per screen. The design is specifically for a two-walled portable immersive panormic display using CaveUT for software, but the techiques shown readily generalize to far more complex displays with up to 32 screens. Nor is it limited to CaveUT--you can use any software which can take advantage of a network of PC's driving LCD projectors. I call it, the "UT-Cave". This portable UT-Cave showed at CHI 2002, Ultra Unreal, the HFES 46th meeting, WIHAVE, VR 2003, and I3D.
Jacobson, J. (2002) CaveUT: Game-Engine Software for CAVE-like displays, a Walk-in Demonstration at the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Minneapolis, April 2002. Walk-in demonstrations are not peer-reviewed and do not appear in the proceedings.
Jacobson, J. (2002) Configuring Multiscreen Immersive Displays With Existing Computer Equipment, Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 46th Annual Meeting, Baltimore, September, p760-765. Demonstration and paper. PDF
Jacobson, J., Lewis, M., Sycara, K., (2002) COTS Multiscreen Displays, Proceedings of the Workshop on Intelligent Human Augmentation and Virtual Envionrments, UNC, October, D-37. PPT
Jacobson, J., Common Office Equipment and CaveUT Make a Cheap Portable Cave, IEEE Virtual Reality Conference 2003 (VR 2003), 22-26 March 2003, Los Angeles, CA, USA. ISBN 0-7695-1882-6 Demonstration.
Jacobson, J. (2003) Using CaveUT to Build Immersive Displays With the Unreal Tournament Engine and a PC Cluster, ACM SIGGRAPH 2003 Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics, Monterry, California, April. Demonstration and short paper. PDF
The Balance Near Automatic Virtual Environment is a four-screen Virtual Reality theater-for-one (the floor is a screen) at the Medical Virtual Reality Center, Department of Otolaryngology, University of Pittsburgh. Under Dr. Larry Hodges supervision, I lead the design and construction efforts. The BNAVE itself is depicted here, on the left, with me in the proper viewer's position.
Whiney, S. L., Sparto, P. J., Brown, K. E., Furman, J. M., Jacobson, J., Redfern, M. S. (2002) The Potential Use of Virtual Reality in Vestibular Rehabilitation: Preliminary Findings With the BNAVE. Neurology Report Vol. 26, No. 2, 2002 PDF
Jacobson, J., Redfern, M. S., Furman, J. M., Whiney, L. W., Sparto, P. J., Wilson, J. B., Hodges, L. F. (2001) Balance NAVE; A Virtual Reality Facility for Research and Rehabilitation of Balance Disorders, Proceedings of the Virtual Reality Software and Technology Meeting, Banff, Canada, November, 2001 PDF
This material also appeared as a poster at the conference, Medicine Meets Virtual Reality 2001, Newport Beach, CA, US, January, 2001. This poster was peer-revied, but does not appear in the proceedings.
At one time, the BNAVE used linearly polarized light (LPL) to generate a stereographic image. (It uses only monoscopic projection, now.) LPL to CPL is a treatise on how to convert linearly polarized light to circularly polarized light (CPL), a scheme which has different trade-offs.
ART 62425 was an experimental interdisciplinary course offered through the Fine Arts Department of Carnegie Mellon university in Fall 2001. Students of all majors studied interactive media, ancient Egyptian history, information theory and teamwork. The instructors were Prof. Lowry Burgess, Dr. Lynn Holden and myself. Students worked in teams to produce several projects, which will soon be made available. The curriculum made use of a layered virtual environment, centered on the Temple of Horus at Edfu. Our ongoing project is to polish and integrate the virtual space for public release sometime in the Spring of 2002.
We are grateful to Jason Yates and Herbert Gilliand for producing the software which connected a VRML world (DesktopVR) to a MUDD (Text-only "VR"). Thanks again to Mr. Gilliand for leading the introduction to MUDDs class day.
A reconstruction of the Temple of Isis in the Roman city of Pompeii as may have appeared in 79ad. Originally built in 1995 by Nicole Jackson and many others, it has recently been translated into a more efficient VRML model, by Veronica Polo. Isis was actually part of a larger effort, the Virtual Pompeii Project at the Studio for Creative Inquiry (SFCI). I was technical director and project manager for the Pompeii project. The Temple of Isis and (later) Virtual Pompeii showed at the DeYoung Museum in San Francisco in October-January 1995/96. See here for some historical background, some screenshots and the long list of credits.
To view Isis in VRML, you need to install a plug-in for your web browser. I recommend either Cosmo or Cortona. Then click here, Isis-3D, or download the whole thing as a ZIP file. The Temple of Isis is open source and freely available for non-commercial purposes.
Jacobson, J., Vadnal, J. (2005p) The Virtual Pompeii Project. -World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (E-Learn) Vancouver, Candada, October 24-28. PDF
Jacobson, J., Vadnal, J (1999) Multimedia in Three Dimensions for Archaeology; Information Retrieval With Interactive Models, Proceedings of the SCI'99/ISAS'99 Conference. PDF.
As we move through the natural world, we use a variety of visuo-motor reflexes to move around objects in our path. For some time "first person view" video games have successfully simulated this movement in the virtual world, causing the user to slide around virtual objects in their path, along walls and around corners. The effect is so natural, that few players complain about it and many don't even notice. The experiments outlined in these papers provide a clear statement of this effect and an empirical basis for testing it.
Jacobson, J., and Lewis, M. (1997) Collision Handling in Virtual Environments; Facilitating Natural User Motion. Proceedings for the 1997 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. PDF HTML
Jacobson, J., and Lewis, M. (1997) An Experimental Comparison of Three Methods for Collision Handling in Virtual Environments. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society41st Annual Meeting. V2, p1273 ISBN 0-945289-07-3 PDF
A three-dimensional schematic of the Tomb of Lady Hao, a bronze age General in ancient China co-authored with Jane Vadnal. It is interactive, allowing the user to query the model for information on what the objects are made of and their cultural origin.
Jacobson, J., and Vadnal, J. (1998) learning in a Highly Interactive, Low-Resolution Virtual Environment: The Tomb of Lady Hao. Proceedings for the 1998 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. PDF
Lewis, M., Lenox, T., Roth E., Roberts, L., Shern, R., Rafalski, T., Jacobson, J., (1987) Support of Teamwork in Human-agent Teams. Proceedings for the 1987 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics.
Helsel, S. and Jacobson, J. (1994) The VR Marketplace Directory. Mecklermedia, Inc.
Virtual Polis 2.0 (1994) A SIMLAB project that never got distributed. It includes a simple VRML version of the Metropol, a nightclub here in Pittsburgh. I made the VRML moodels for the Metropol, the travel agency and the clothing store. To view the Metropol in VRML, you need to install a plug-in for your web browser. I recommend either Cosmo or Cortona. Then click here: Virtual Metropol. Or you can download it in a single lump: metropol.zip.
I am a doctoral student at the Department of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Also a worker-bee at the Medical Virtual Reality Center where the BNAVE resides. Someday I will graduate....