Large-Scale Immersive Displays in Entertainment and Education

2007

Immersive displays generally fall within three categories: small-scale, single-user displays (head-mounted displays and desktop stereoscopic displays); medium-scale displays designed for small numbers of collaborative users (CAVEs, reality centres and power walls); and large-scale displays designed for group immersion experiences (IMAX, simulator rides, domes). Small-and medium-scale displays have received by far the most attention from researchers, perhaps due to their smaller size, lower cost and easy accessibility. Large-scale immersive displays present unique technical challenges largely met by niche manufacturers offering proprietary solutions. The rapidly growing number of largescale displays in planetariums, science centers and universities worldwide (275 theaters to date), coupled with recent trends towards more open, extensible systems and mature software tools, offer greater accessibility to these environments for research, interactive science/art application development, and visualization of complex databases for both student and public audiences. An industry-wide survey of leading-edge largescale immersive displays and manufacturers is provided with the goal of fostering industry/academic collaborations. Research needs include advancements in immersive display design, real-time spherical rendering, real-time group interactive technologies and applications, and methods for aggregating and navigating extremely large scientific databases with imbedded physical/astrophysical simulations.

2020

The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at UNSW has created a versatile virtual reality theatre that, by combining real-time 360-degree omnistereo projection with surround audio and marker-less motion tracking, provides a highly immersive and interactive environment for up to 20 users. The theatre, codenamed AVIE, serves as the Centre's principal platform for experiments in interactive and emergent narrative, artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, virtual heritage, panoramic video and real-time computer graphics, as well as our primary platform for public exhibition of iCinema projects. This paper briefly discusses the design of the system, technical challenges, novel features and current and future applications of the system. We believe our system to be the first and only 360 degree cylindrical stereo virtual reality theatre constructed to date.

2000

Immersive projection displays have played an important role in enabling large-format virtual reality systems such as the CAVE and CAVE like devices and the various immersive desks and desktop-like displays. However, these devices have played a minor role so far in advancing the sense of immersion for conferencing systems. The Access Grid project led by Argonne is exploring the use of large-scale projection based systems as the basis for building room oriented collaboration and semi-immersive visualization systems. We believe these multiprojector systems will become common infrastructure in the future, largely based on their value for enabling group-to-group collaboration in an environment that can also support large-format projector based visualization. Creating a strong sense of immersion is an important goal for future collaboration technologies. Immersion in conferencing applications implies that the users can rely on natural sight and audio cues to facilitate interactions with participants at remote sites. The Access Grid is a low cost environment aimed primarily at supporting conferencing applications, but it also enables semiimmersive visualization and in particular, remote visualization. In this paper, we will describe the current state of the Access Grid project and how it relates and compares to other environments. We will also discuss augmentations to the Access Grid that will enable it to support mo re immersive visualizations. These enhancements include stereo, higher performance rendering support, tracking and non-uniform projection surface.

Proceedings of the …, 2006

As the interest of the public for new forms of media grows, museums and theme parks select real time Virtual Reality productions as their presentation medium. Based on threedimensional graphics, interaction, sound, music and intense story telling they mesmerize their audiences. The Foundation of the Hellenic World (FHW) having opened so far to the public three different Virtual Reality theaters, is in the process of building a new Dome-shaped Virtual Reality theatre with a capacity of 130 people. This fully interactive theatre will present new experiences in immersion to the visitors. In this paper we present the challenges encountered in developing productions for such a large spherical display system as well as building the underlying realtime display and support systems.

2002

We describe Coliseum, a desktop system for immersive teleconferencing. Five cameras attached to a desktop LCD monitor are directed at a participant. View synthesis methods produce arbitrary-perspective renderings of the participant from these video streams, and transmit them to other participants. Combining these renderings in a shared synthetic environment gives the illusion of having remote participants interacting in a common space.

IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, 2000

I n a familiar scene from an old movie, generals huddle around a large map, pushing models of tanks and infantry regiments about to indicate the current battle situation. Today, the scene might include electronic displays and networked sensing technology, but the basic form would remain the same: A small group of domain experts surround and gesture toward a common data set, hoping to achieve consensus. This mode of decision making is pervasive, ranging in use from US Marine Corps command and control applications to product design review meetings. Such applications demonstrate the need for VR systems that accommodate small groups of people working in close proximity. Yet, while non-head-mounted, immersive displays perform well for single-person work, when used by small groups they are hampered by an unacceptably large degree of distortion between the head-tracked viewpoint and an untracked collaborator's perspective (see ). What looks like a sphere to one user will look like an egg to another. 2 Solving this problem is critical. Decision makers and designers cannot jointly view and respond to data when all but one see incorrect images.

ACM Transactions on Multimedia Computing, Communications, and Applications, 2005

Coliseum is a multiuser immersive remote teleconferencing system designed to provide collaborative workers the experience of face-to-face meetings from their desktops. Five cameras are attached to each PC display and directed at the participant. From these video streams, view synthesis methods produce arbitrary-perspective renderings of the participant and transmit them to others at interactive rates, currently about 15 frames per second. Combining these renderings in a shared synthetic environment gives the appearance of having all participants interacting in a common space. In this way, Coliseum enables users to share a virtual world, with acquired-image renderings of their appearance replacing the synthetic representations provided by more conventional avatar-populated virtual worlds. The system supports virtual mobility---participants may move around the shared space---and reciprocal gaze, and has been demonstrated in collaborative sessions of up to ten Coliseum workstations, an...

2007

The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at UNSW has created a versatile virtual reality theatre that, by combining real-time 360-degree omnistereo projection with surround audio and marker-less motion tracking, provides a highly immersive and interactive environment for up to 20 users. The theatre, codenamed AVIE, serves as the Centre's principal platform for experiments in interactive and emergent narrative, artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, virtual heritage, panoramic video and real-time computer graphics, as well as our primary platform for public exhibition of iCinema projects. This paper briefly discusses the design of the system, technical challenges, novel features and current and future applications of the system. We believe our system to be the first and only 360 degree cylindrical stereo virtual reality theatre constructed to date.

Proceedings of the …, 2007

The iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research at UNSW has created a versatile virtual reality theatre that, by combining real-time 360-degree omnistereo projection with surround audio and marker-less motion tracking, provides a highly immersive and interactive environment for up to 20 users. The theatre, codenamed AVIE, serves as the Centre's principal platform for experiments in interactive and emergent narrative, artificial intelligence, human-computer interfaces, virtual heritage, panoramic video and real-time computer graphics, as well as our primary platform for public exhibition of iCinema projects. This paper briefly discusses the design of the system, technical challenges, novel features and current and future applications of the system. We believe our system to be the first and only 360 degree cylindrical stereo virtual reality theatre constructed to date.

ACM SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics, 1997