Click on image for info about the CAVE and more pics

The next big thing... Visbox! If you haven't already, read my interview at Gamespot! CAVE QUAKE II is an adaptation of the popular PC game Quake2 for the CAVE, the world's best virtual reality platform! The demo is not a true Quake2 client, but it is quite playable and shows how compelling a game becomes with life-sized stereo graphics! It also demonstrates the advantages of head-tracked perspective. If you want to look down, look down! If you want to crouch, crouch! You can peek around corners simply by moving your head! The input device (called a wand) is also tracked. From your perspective, the gun appears where the wand is and has the correct orientation. All you do is point where you want to shoot and press a button! Here's a little bit about how it was done: I improved the pfQuake2 loaders by Rick Weyrauch and made them work with the pfCAVE library. As a result, I had the geometry and animations for the levels and the monsters. I then wrote the actual CAVE game engine from scratch. This involved implementing user navigation, collision detection, gravity, ai for the monsters, gun-fire, synchronized sound effects, networking for deathmatch, etc. Basically, the loaders gave me the geometry from the PC game, but I had to add behavior to the geometry and implement user interaction. The CAVE's head-tracked perspective made for some interesting implementation challenges not found in regular game programming. In addition, the CAVE is a multiprocessor system which brings up other programming issues related to shared memory, synchronization, etc. Questions/comments? Send me an email: paul.rajlich /at/ yahoo.com. Contrary to popular belief, there is no such a thing as too much email. :-)