Hi, did you hear about the last VR Geeks event we planed? Here is a brief summary:

The 15th November we visited a CAVE: the "LiVES" at Dassault Systèmes.

In this big system, we shared a great and exotic journey through virtual universes!
We tried some cars, sailed aboard an Egyptian mortuary boat and flew side by side with some racing aircrafts in the desert!
Other minor things happened like shooting ghosts and some strange flashbacks to our childhood...
But we were safe in the end!

All along this fantastic night, the group of 13 VR Geeks had time to share experiences, make their own experiments and have some geeky conversations about hardware, software and other VR topics.

 

Here are some pictures of what happened:

You can find more pictures at http://cb.nowan.net/galerie/VRGeeks-Lives/index.html.

 

More about the LiVES:

This system is an approximately 2 million Euros CAVE built in 2008 by Barco and Dassault Systèmes. It is 5m long, 2.7m deep and it is up to 2.4m. Four 1080p projectors generate the image for the front screen (5mx2.4m), two projectors do the right screen (2.7mx2.4m) and one does the floor screen (5mx2.7m). The front and side screens are retro projected, so the user cannot create immersion-breaking shadows on them. The floor screen is projected from the ceiling. An optical ART tracking system broadcasts the inputs through a VRPN server and a seven nodes cluster (and a master computer) runs the experiences.

3DVIA Virtools and 3DVIA Studio are the main software used to run the immersive experiences.

Here is a video about the system and its creation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TKlyDl0aE34#!

 

Thanks again Dassault Systèmes for the trip!

 

Virtually yours.

(Thanks Sylvie Brunet, I paraphrased some parts from your last enthusiastic mail. ;)  )