UCSD’s StarCAVE is bringing Virtual Reality back
From Gizmodo:
UC at San Diego has the closest thing to an X-Men-style Danger Room in its new StarCAVE, a small room that entirely surrounds you, hurtling 68 million pixels at your eyeballs at near-perfect resolution. Pop on polarized glasses and the whole thing goes 3D. Grasping a wireless “wand,” you can walk through tall buildings, fly over cities, pick apart tiny cell structures or embrace entire galaxies
…
The room—the third and by far best generation of the “Cave Automated Virtual Environment” pioneered in Chicago in the early 1990s—is pentagon shaped. Each wall has three panels, the top and bottom of which are angled 15 degrees inward for an immersive (and slightly Roddenberry-esque) experience. Each individual panel gets two of its own 2K-resolution (2048 x 1536) projectors, providing a discrete experience for each eye when viewing in 3D. Even the floor gets a pair of projectors. The effect is a better-than-HD view—the equivalent of 20/40 vision—anywhere you turn.
More info on the UCSD site.
thanks for the tip-off bindychild!
Damn. Having experienced a pretty rudimentary version of this in the Ueno Science Museum here, which was an oblong-spherical room with a walkway in the middle (annoying) and lo-res graphics, and still finding it to be awesome, I want this. Someone bring it to Tokyo for a visit.