VR Cave Caen

In order to create the largest VR CAVE installed for the French university community, the CIREVE,” Centre for Interdisciplinary Virtual Reality” of the University of Caen, called upon us to deliver a four-sided immersive CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) to allow the University to work in a virtual environment.

The CIREVE was created in 2006 to put in place virtual reality in the University of Caen. Its mission is to make virtual reality equipment accessible (VR rooms, graphic card, interfaces, projectors, screens); promote the use of VR in universities, education and research; create virtual reality projects, and make it accessible to students, lecturers, PhDs and external partners.

Antycip was proud to be working on this project with the CIREVE, the fourth VR project of a successful long lasting relationship. It consisted of a multifunctional building with one analysis room, two healthcare rooms, one amphitheatre (150 seats) with live projection of the experimentation, with development support for the CAVE operation and the migration of projects.

This four-sided virtual reality CAVE, of a projection surface of 118m² is located in Caen University and provides a great expression of the power of virtual reality to give users an immersive, high resolution view of their design, data or information.

VR CAVE Applications

The CIREVE VR CAVE is being used for a wide range of applications:

• Visualisation: The VR Cave allows to visualise interactively and in 3 dimensions, environments from the past, inaccessible locations, historic representations (The history of Rome), archaeological findings, or to create futuristic environments. The main domains using VR as a visualisation tool are varied: History, archaeology, geography, literature, industry, architecture, arts and design.
• Experimenting: by interacting in real-time with the 3D Digital world, VR offers new experimentation perspectives in life-like and controllable environments (study of flooding). The main domains using VR to that purpose are the health industry, psychology, sociology and sports departments.
• Training: The knowledge progress can be easily represented, experimenting in a safe environment is allowing various repetitions, which makes virtual reality the best tool for training. Domains using VR for training include: Education, language studies, IT, serious game.

Challenges faced

While working on this unique installation, the Antycip team had to take into account various requirements and challenges. First of all, the size, fragility and the heavy weight of the glass screens (9m long by 3m high) meant that we had to find innovative ways to transport it and successfully install it. The technical equipment also had to fit in a restricted technical area, while also taking into account the challenges faced by the bespoke resin floor.

You can find below a video of the finished installation:

Hardware & Software Technologies

The system is equipped with
– Unity 5
– CryVR: management software for the CAVE developed by the CIREVE (Multi‑channel stereoscopic synchronized rendering, tracking)
– 7 Christie Mirage HD10K-M 3D projectors (16 millions pixels in total)
– 12 tracking cameras Vicon Bonita 10
– Multi-dimensional sound system (7.1)
– Active Stereoscopy
– Handled device control
– Vicon Apex
– 5DT Data Glove Ultra
– Dikablis Ergoneers eye-tracker
– Motek GRAIL (Gait Real-time Analysis Interactive Lab)