By Jonathan Sidener
UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER
September 18, 2008

JOHN GASTALDO / Union-Tribune Jurgen Schulze, a researcher at University of California San Diego, demonstrated StarCAVE, a virtual-reality lab unveiled yesterday. StarCAVE pushes the limits of video-game industry graphics hardware and HDTV technology to create a tool for serious science.

JOHN GASTALDO / Union-Tribune Special glasses are used in StarCAVE, which produces 68 million pixels per frame of video - 34 million for each eye.

UCSD's new StarCAVE, unveiled yesterday, brings new levels of realism to virtual reality. Schulze, who helped develop the lab, hopes the new tool will help unlock mysteries such as how proteins fold, or assemble.

Being able to walk through high-resolution, 3-D protein molecules and zoom in and out could lead to new drugs or new understanding in other sciences, Schulze and others at UCSD say.

StarCAVE pushes the limits of video-game industry graphics hardware and HDTV technology to create a tool for serious science. Fields such as astronomy, structural engineering and archaeology stand to benefit from virtual exploration and collaboration, said Thomas DeFanti, director of visualization at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2.

DeFanti's team built the original Cave Automated Virtual Environment, or CAVE, at the University of Illinois and Chicago in 1991. The StarCAVE represents the third generation of virtual reality rooms.

Beyond university and high-tech research, virtual reality advances could lead to new technologies, such as 3-D phone booths or virtual reality environments instead of office cubicle walls, DeFanti said.

“There are a number of medical applications such as CAT scans and brain imaging,” he said. “It's much easier for non-experts to understand a 3-D medical image than a 2-D image.”

The Cave, as the researchers call it, is a five-sided room with each side made up of three rear-projection screens. Two projectors behind each screen create stereo high-definition images. The polarized lenses direct slightly different images to the viewer's left and right eyes to create the 3-D images.

The system produces 68 million pixels per frame of video – 34 million for each eye – including the pixels displayed on two screens that make up the room's floor.

“We're producing 20/40 resolution,” DeFanti said, referring to the well-known measure in which 20/20 is normal human vision. “Previous virtual reality environments are at 20/140.”

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