Cave automatic virtual environment
immersive virtual reality environment
A cave automatic virtual environment (better known by the recursive acronym CAVE) is an immersive virtual reality environment where projectors are directed to between three and six of the walls of a room-sized cube. The name is also a reference to the allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic in which a philosopher contemplates perception, reality, and illusion. CAVE is considered to be one of the first VR "rooms".
The CAVE was invented by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin, and Thomas A. DeFanti at the University of Illinois, Chicago Electronic Visualization Laboratory in 1992. The images on the walls were in stereo to give a depth cue.
General characteristics
A CAVE is typically a video theater situated within a larger room. The walls of a CAVE are typically made up of rear-projection screens, however large-scale LED displays are becoming more common. The floor can be a downward-projection screen, a bottom projected screen, or a flat panel display. The projection systems are very high-resolution due to the near distance viewing which requires very small pixel sizes to retain the illusion of reality. The user wears 3D glasses inside the CAVE to see 3D graphics generated by the CAVE. People using the CAVE can see objects apparently floating in the air, and can walk around them, getting a proper view of what they would look like in reality.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cave automatic virtual environment” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.