August 18th, 2009 in Technology / Computer Sciences

The NexCAVE technology was inspired by Calit2's StarCAVE virtual reality environment, pictured here with its creator, Calit2 Research Scientist Tom DeFanti.

Surround 3-D TV is poised to take over your living room. For the first time, a team of researchers at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) at the University of California, San Diego, have designed a 9-panel, 3-D visualization display from HDTV LCD flat-screens developed by JVC.

The technology, dubbed "NexCAVE," was inspired by Calit2's StarCAVE virtual reality environment and designed and developed by Calit2 Research Scientist Tom DeFanti, Virtual Reality Design Engineer Greg Dawe, Project Scientist Jürgen Schulze and Visualization Specialist Andrew Prudhomme.

Although the StarCAVE's unique pentagon shape and 360-degree views make it possible for groups of scientists to venture into worlds as small as nanoparticles and as big as the cosmos, its expensive projection system requires constant maintenance — an obstacle DeFanti and Dawe were determined to overcome.

"It's always been our dream to make a projector-free LCD flat panel CAVE," DeFanti says. "The trick was to get the form of the huge StarCAVE into the space of a living room. We took a speculative leap by overlapping 9 panels, and it turned out better than we thought."

DeFanti and his colleagues — who include Dan Sandin, DeFanti's co-founder of the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois, Chicago — developed the NexCAVE technology at the behest of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), which established a special partnership with UC San Diego last year to collaborate on world-class visualization and virtual-reality research and training activities.

The KAUST campus includes a Geometric Modeling and Scientific Visualization Research Center featuring a 21-panel NexCAVE and several other new visualization displays developed at Calit2. Classes at the brand-new, state-of-the-art, 36-million square meter campus start Sept. 5.

When paired with polarized stereoscopic glasses, the NexCAVE's modular, micropolarized panels and related software will make it possible for a broad range of UCSD and KAUST scientists — from geologists and oceanographers to archaeologists and astronomers — to visualize massive datasets in three dimensions, at unprecedented speeds and at a level of detail impossible to obtain on a myopic desktop display.

"The NexCAVE's technology delivers a faithful, deep 3-D experience with great color saturation, contrast and really good stereo separation," explains DeFanti. "The JVC panels' xpol technology circularly polarizes successive lines of the screen clockwise and anticlockwise and the glasses you wear make you see, in each eye, either the clockwise or anticlockwise images. This way, the data appears in three dimensions. Since these HDTVs are very bright, 3-D data in motion can be viewed in a very bright environment, even with the lights in the room on.

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