COTS Multiscreen Displays

Jacobson, J., Lewis M., Sycara, K. http;//planetjeff.net

Commercial Game Technology for Low Cost Panoramic Immersive Displays

Figure 1: Schematic of a two-walled immersive display. CaveUT allows up to 32 screens.

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).

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.

October 2002

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 210-degree arc. VAE was built first in WTK, translated to VRML, then to UT format.

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.

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