Practical Design and Implementation of a CAVE Environment

CAVE systems are nowadays one of the best Virtual Reality (VR) immersive devices available for rendering virtual environments. Unfortunately, such kind of hardware is extremely expensive, complex and cum-bersome, thus limited in its spread. Several cheaper solutions already exist, but they implement usually only a subset of features of a professional CAVE (like a reduced number of wall-displays, no stereographic at all or with a low-quality support, low brightness, etc.). In this paper we describe how we have built a low cost CAVE with four screens (three walls and a floor), stereographic rendering and user tracking by only using hardware commonly available on the market and free software, we show the different solutions and work-around we implemented to solve the problems we encountered and we conclude with a fair evaluation of our system by using two applications we developed with it.