COTS Multiscreen Displays
Commercial Game Technology for Low
Cost Panoramic Immersive Displays
Immersive multiscreen displays can be assembled from
Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) components at very low
cost and remarkably high performance. For example, a
$1000 PC may be equipped with a $1000 graphics card
capable of drawing 54 million triangles per second (i.e. the
Nvidia Quadro4 750).
Figure 1: Schematic of a twowalled immersive display. CaveUT
allows up to 32 screens.
This particular PC-based cave design takes advantage of the
graphically powerful and inexpensive game engine used in
Unreal Tournament (UT). Unreal Tournament is partially
open source and supports rapid authoring of visually rich
virtual worlds, complex animations, alternative physics and
artificial intelligence. It also supports multi-user shared
virtual environments networked via the internet or any
standard LAN.
Figure 2: A Two-Walled UT-Cave showing the interior
of a virtual fortress. The components are lightweight
and low cost—the whole thing fits into standard airline
luggage for one person.
Figure 3: CaveUT is used to display Virtual Ancient Egypt (VAE) in the Earth
Theater of the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh. It has five Screens in a 210degree arc. VAE was built first in WTK, translated to VRML, then to UT format.
To display a single UT environment across multiple screens requires the freeware
modification, CaveUT. Figures 1 and 2 illustrate the simplest possible design: two
screens, front-projected, mounted on a lightweight portable frame. However, a
single display can have any number of screens, each in any orientation to the
viewer. Each screen requires a PC, a digital projector, a user license for UT ($15)
and a network connection. Figure 3 illustrates a five-screen display.
This technology lacks many of the features found in a traditional CAVE™, but that
will change with further development, and it is still useful for many applications.
CaveUT is an entirely open-source effort. Full instructions on how to configure the
software, hardware and a two-walled starter display are at http://planetjeff.net
Jacobson, J., Lewis M., Sycara, K.
October 2002
http;//planetjeff.net