Virtual Reality Lab
The CUBE (CAVE)
The floor size of our CUBE is 2800 x 2800 mm, the hight of the front, left and right wall is 2500 mm. The outer frame is made of wood. The walls consist of a flexible rearprojection screen, whereas the floor is a white painted wooden plate. The video resolution is 1074 x 1050 pixels on the floor and 1176 x 1050 on the three walls, all driven at 120 Hz frequency. The large-size and immersive projection encourages users to discuss their datasets with on-site colleagues. Furthermore, it is possible discuss results with worldwide partners in collaborative working environments while looking at the same data.
For the tracking of the viewer's head and hand we use an optical tracking system.
Visualization cluster
The CUBE is driven by a DALCO Visualization cluster of 40 Nodes, each equipped with up to 64 GB RAM and an Nvidia Quadro 6000, FX 5800 or 4500 Board. The first eight nodes are connected to the four projectors via fiber cables.
The dual boot cluster can either run under Linux (currently Scientific Linux 5.5) or Windows HPC Server 2008 R2.
To achieve interactive framerates for large datasets, we use the cluster for parallel rendering. Each node renders only a part of the scene. That means that a large amount of data has to be transferred between the nodes. This communication is running over a high-speed DDR Infiniband interconnect.
On the software side the CUBE is driven by our COVISE virtual reality front-end called OpenCOVER . This software allows interaction with on-going numerical simulations and post-processing steps mainly in the area of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and structural mechanics (e.g. crash analysis). For an overview of the projects involving COVISE and Virtual Reality please click here.
Contact
If you are interested in using the CUBE to analyse your datasets, to bring your applications into the CUBE or have questions regarding the technical equipment, please contact one of the following people: