Teesside Uni installs VR system

Situated within the £10m Innovation Building, the home of the School of Science & Technology, Antycip Simulation has installed four Christie Mirage S+6K stereoscopic projectors to use with the Yview.

The integration replaces the custom-built ‘Hemispherium', a 6m dome, which was built when the University's Virtual Reality Centre was constructed in 1997, and installed with a Silicon Graphics ONYX engine.  This was decommissioned two years ago as the installation had required seven projectors and was considered to be insufficiently bright.

Fred Charles, the School of Computing's principal lecturer in Visualisation, had specified the tender requirements for both the structure and the computer system.  Antycip Simulation was awarded the tender and he then worked with Antycip Simulation's engineer Marc Lechalupé to achieve the school's objectives.

The four stand-mounted projectors fire onto the specialist screen surfaces, with the floor projector refracting the beam down onto the 3x3m base via a large overhead mirror.  The brighter and higher resolution projectors enabled details in the simulation environments that had not been visible before e.g. cracks in the terrains where the modelling needed more attention.

Antycip Simulation's Yview VR system also affords far more useable net space than the old Hemispherium, allowing up to six people to experience fully-immersive 3D virtual environments at the same time.   The rear projection onto flat screens is fairly standard as it does not require complex optical correction and image blending as required when displaying onto curved surfaces, such as onto the old Hemispherium.  Yview allows for full user interaction with the 3D virtual environment, whereas the old Hemispherium was only limited to a single user with limited means of interaction.

As the computer system configuration is standard in terms of the architecture (server/clients), it is possible to write software to extend from single projection to multi-projection graphics engines with limited development costs.  The ORAD dedicated graphics generator allows the combination of the graphics output cards.

Control is from a PC cluster composed of eight PC clients where each one runs a full version of the visualisation engine. However, the virtual camera for each PC is calculated and offset (position and orientation) based on the eye it is rendering and the screen it is displayed onto. The resolution of the final stereoscopic image is 1400x1050 at 110Hz, therefore each eye is rendered at 55Hz. The PCs are genlocked and synchronised, with both the projectors and the emitters for the shutter glasses.

Teesside's research lab also specialises in the field of Interactive Storytelling, a major endeavour by the university to develop new media to offer a radically new user experience, with a potential to revolutionise digital entertainment.  This covers a varied spectrum of paradigms from a Holodeck-like experience, which Antycip Simulation's Yview installation supports, to interactive films, where the spectator can influence the unfolding of the story.

Teesside's research lab is presently coordinating an EU funded research project on Interactive Storytelling, called IRIS.