Pc-based Multi-projection Plane Immersive Virtual Environment And Its Applications

Immersive multi-projective virtual environment is capable of providing high-quality and high-resolution stereo images to more than one user at a same time. The system is highly immersive by covering most of the user's field of view and by providing natural interaction methods. These systems are highly applicable in industrial design N manufacture entertainment exhibition and educational fields. Traditionally,these systems are driven by professional graphic workstations therefore they are not widely used due to their high cost.On the other hand,the performance of the PC system is developing continuously and rapidly. Now there is no clear gap between high performance PC and professional workstations considering processing and graphics performance. Replacing professional workstations in the traditional system with multiple high performance PCs is a more cost effective solution,the high performance requirement of the system can be met while the cost can be cut making the system more affordable.There are various architecture alternatives regarding to different system levels when implement a PC based system. The choice must be made by taking into account the factors such as the requirement of the application,the final performance of the target system,the cost,upgradability and scalability of the target system.Stereographic generation and synchronization control are the key techniques when implementing a PC based immersive muliti-projection virtual environment. Stereographic projection mode will affect the hardware choices,the image quality and the final system cost;Multiple PCs are coordinated by the synchronization controls,these control techniques combine the outputs from different nodes to a correct and consistent virtual world.The paper will introduce the detailed design and implementation of our PC based immersive multi-projection system:PC-CAVE. The system is driven by four networked high performance PCs. The new PC based system has a close or even better performance compared to SGI based CAVE system,furthermore it will cut down the system cost by much. PCCAVELib is a middle-ware for developing applications on PC-CAVE system,it can simplify the application development cycle. In addition we will present several application we developed on this system.