Immersive VR Visualizations by VFIVE. Part 1: Development

CAVE is a room-sized, immersive virtual reality system developed in early 1990s at Univ. Illinois, Chicago[1]. Wall screens on which stereoscopic images are projected from the rear surround the viewer in the room. The floor is another screen on which stereo images are projected usually from the ceiling. A high-precision head tracking system with the six degrees-of-freedom (DOF) is installed. The tracker’s data are sent to a graphics system to generate natural scenes for the viewer. A portable controller, sometimes called wand, is used for the human machine interface in the CAVE’s room. The wand is also tracked. Compared with other virtual reality (VR) systems, such as the head-mounted display system, CAVE provides much wider view and higher immersive sense. The scientific visualization is one of the most important application fields from the first CAVE[1] to the latest generation called StarCAVE[2]. One of the early visualization tools for CAVE systems was CAVEvis[3] developed in 1990s, which was to analyze time varying fluid data. Since then, CAVE systems have been used in broad spectrum of visualizations, including seismic simulation[4], meteorological simulation[5], biomedical fluid simulation[6], magnetic resonance imaging[7], turbulence simulation[8], CFD of molten iron[9], CFD of wind turbines[10], geomagnetic field[11], and archaeological[12]. Various applications in scientific visualization and related user-interface study at Brown University are summarized in[13]. An application of the StarCAVE[2] in geophysics can be found in[14]. We also started developing visualization tools for a CAVE system in the late 1990s for visualization of our simulations on plasma physics and related fields[15]. Our visualizations in the CAVE gradually attracted interests of other simulation researchers. By their request, we developed several CAVE programs for different kinds of simulation data. Through the experience of those developments, we had found that several methods and tools could be used in common. We combined them into an general-purpose visualization application for field-type data[16, 17]. Since then, we have been improving VFIVE for more than a decade. The continued improvements have made this application being a matured, practical tool for three-dimensional visualization in CAVE systems. To the authors’ knowledge, VFIVE is unique visualization application for CAVE systems with regard to its long continued development history. Another characteristic feature of VFIVE is that it has always been developed in a “request-driven” way. We have added new functions or visualization methods only when they are strongly required by simulation researchers. This policy has played an important role to keep VFIVE being a simple, minimum, but still practical tool. The purpose of this paper is to summarize the development of VFIVE. Implementations and usages of various visualization methods in VFIVE are outlined. VFIVE is coded with C++ language with standard APIs of OpenGL and CAVElib. The source codes are freely distributed. It runs both on Linux-based workstations and Windows-based PC clusters. VFIVE is now used in various CAVE systems in Japan. It is also used as a base code set for further developments of advanced visualizations. Those applications and scientific achievements made possible by VFIVE in several CAVE systems are described in our another paper[18].