ODU's Cave Automatic Virtual Environment offers room with a view, literally

NORFOLK _ With little but the glow of their computer monitors to see by, a team of researchers type and toil in the darkness, manipulating and ministering to a device so complex and powerful, it creates alternate realities.

``The intention is for this to be a very low-light environment,'' explained Cathy Lascara, an inhabitant of the cave-like computer room tucked away in a corner of Old Dominion University's field house. Low light makes it easier to see the vivid, three-dimensional scenes within the room's 10-by-10-by-9-foot Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, or CAVE.

The CAVE, run by ODU's Center for Coastal Physical Oceanography, lies on the cutting edge of making computers more people-friendly: using voice commands instead of keyboards; motion wands instead of mice; and lush 3-D environments in place of menus and flat screens.

Powered by a refrigerator-sized SGI graphics supercomputer, ODU's months-old CAVE promises to give academics a new, three-dimensional outlook on their research. And not too far down the road, Hampton Roads businesses may call on the CAVE to simulate and test solutions to their problems, researchers said.

ODU's CAVE is one of hundreds around the world working on ``tele-immersive'' computing environments. ``Tele-'' because it allows far-flung participants to meet in the same virtual environment, be it a computer model of the known universe or the imaginary battle space of a video game called Quake. ``Immersive'' because it envelops a computer user so that he or she feels surrounded by the action, or data, as researchers prefer to call it.

The CAVE itself consists of three translucent screen walls and a fourth ``wall,'' the floor. Projectors on the sides and top of the wall-screen enclosure shoot images around the CAVE user. With the aid of ``stereoscopic'' 3-D glasses and a ceiling-mounted head tracker, the system is able to give the illusion that one really is flying over and through the Chesapeake Bay, manipulating a star cluster, or having it out with gun-toting mutants in a futuristic dungeon.

Perhaps one of the best features, for the ODU researchers, is that it lets them interact with their supercomputing counterparts across the country and even around the world.

That capability puts everyone on the same virtual, visual page, whether they're trying to model a star collision or are seeking clues to a body of water's declining fish population.

A few years ago, ODU's oceanography department achieved an incredible feat -- gathering and digitizing detailed information on the Chesapeake Bay's tidal patterns, temperatures, layers and winds. A better understanding of how these variables interact could help protect the Bay's denizens from natural and human hazards.

Amazing as ODU's data collection was, it left the information in flat, two-dimensional graphic form -- things such as contour maps or graphical cross-sections. It wasn't easy to draw conclusions from the information.

``Since your brain thinks in 3-D, intuition is made much easier when you see data in 3-D,'' explained Glen Wheless, co-director with Lascara at the oceanography department's six-member Virtual Environments Lab.

To put things into perspective, so to speak, Wheless won a National Science Foundation grant in 1996 that purchased an ``Immersadesk.'' Wheless describes the flat-screen panel as ``the poor man's CAVE,'' since it does offer 3-D images, but not a fully immersive experience.

This year, through a grant from the Defense Department's Office of Naval Research, ODU acquired the CAVE, which is built by Fakespace Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.

CAVEs -- the virtual kind -- have been around since 1992. The University of Illinois, renowned for its leading-edge computer science programs, developed the CAVE.

ODU's arrived in June, with much of the summer spent installing and testing the device as painting and construction went on outside the CAVE entrance. An entire CAVE setup costs about $1 million, but ODU paid about $700,000 -- a break from Fakespace (at the time called Pyramid Systems) because of the work done by Lascara and Wheless with national computing initiatives.

ODU rainmaker and Vice President of finance Dave Harnage, who helped arrange a half-price deal on the school's $1.5 million supercomputer, lined up $78,000 to upgrade the Virtual Environments Lab's Onyx2 graphics machine to CAVE level.

``We got a very good deal,'' Wheless said.

CAVE-related research hasn't all been buckets of sweat.

An unlikely scientific catalyst has emerged to ``assist'' those trying to improve tele-immersive computing. Quake, a gory, wildly popular, 3-D shoot-'em-up game introduced for PCs in 1996, found its way to the CAVE platform last year when University of Illinois alum Paul Rajlich painstakingly converted the program's source code.

His adaptation of id Software's runaway hit spread like wildfire at CAVE sites, including ODU. Rajlich thinks it's a hint of what's possible in the future of gaming entertainment.

``If current PC graphics-card trends continue, then CAVE-like technology will become much cheaper in the next several years,'' Rajlich told the University of Illinois' alumni newsletter.

``About 75 percent of the cost of the CAVE is the computer that runs it,'' he said. ``When the technology becomes significantly cheaper,'' gaming and virtual reality probably will come together, he said.

Far from being a frivolous game, ``we actually get a lot of useful information from it,'' Lascara said of CAVE Quake. ``We can download these games and learn a lot about user-interface paradigms.''

For instance, instead of using a keyboard to control your character, as in the PC version of Quake, in CAVE, Quake players use a motion-sensing wand. In Quake and other programs, the Virtual Environments Lab team takes notes on ways to make the controls more intuitive.

In that vein, major corporations that can afford CAVE access use the set-ups to simulate new processes or designs -- for a fraction of the cost of building prototypes. For instance, Caterpillar, the construction equipment maker, uses a CAVE to test its proposed vehicles' cab ergonomics and visibility.

Wheless said the Virtual Environments Lab is working toward relationships with industry, but is not ready to go public.

``Suffice it to say, we are very pro-business use of the CAVE,'' he said. ``We see great potential in architectural fly-throughs, engineering design work, training and other applications of the technology.''