Virtual Reality

I decided to share my experiences on setting up a new VR Lab from scratch.
Where does this story take place I hear you say - in the new IT Building in University College Cork, Ireland. In fact this story begins in the Department of Computer Science, where I lecture.

The VR room is a relatively large room (compared to other labs in the building). The room is notionally divided into four equal parts. Much of the activity to be undertaken in this space involves polarized 3D projection, so it was important to have as much control over the light in the room as possible. To this end, all surfaces in the room, apart form the floor, are painted black. The lighting in the room is divided in to four zones, each zone has individual on-off controls, and is dimmable.

One zone is intended for our large-format 3D projection system, while the other three zones are composed of various workstations for head-tracking, gesture-based interaction, BCI, 3D Digitization, motion tracking, and other VR related activities.

The first part of building the lab involves the setting-up and configuration of the 3D projection system. Our system is a rear-projection dual head circular polarized system. (At a later stage I will list the individual devices and models.) Anyone who has set one of these systems up before will testify that the most difficult part of the setup is the calibration of the projectors. In fact there is so much too it, that I will cover it in another post.

Below are some images from the first couple of days setting up the lab.