The CAVE™

Technological Innovation

NEM-Avatar Implementation

Software/Hardware

The first experiment of a virtual interactive character animated with an electromagnetic system (recorder motion-tracked animation), NEM was successfully accomplished in the CAVE™ of the University of Illinois at Chicago's EVL.

The CAVE® uses a tracking system to gather tracking information corresponding to the position of the user's head and hand in order for the computer to calculate the perspective from a user-centered point of view. Tracking is done with electromagnetic systems such as Ascension's Flock of Birds, and sensors are attached to the stereo glasses and to the 3-D mouse. This same system is used to record motion-tracked animation. The first experiments with this system were performed in development of the MMB application.

Figure 2. MMB: