Overview of the DiVE

The Duke immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) came on-line mid-November 2005 representing the fourth 6-sided CAVE-like system in the United States.[1] The DiVE is a 3m x 3m x 3m stereoscopic rear projected room with head and hand tracking and real time computer graphics. All six surfaces – the four walls, the ceiling and the floor – are used as screens onto which computer graphics are displayed. For virtual worlds designed for this system, it is a fully immersive room in which the individual (researcher, educator, etc) literally walks into the world, is surrounded by the display and is capable of interacting with virtual objects in the world. Stereo glasses provide depth perception, and a handheld “wand” controls navigation and input to into the world for manipulating virtual objects.

 

The acquisition of the DiVE is a direct result of Duke’s strategic plan, Building on Excellence. One component of this plan is to improve computational resources, methods, and expertise within the Duke community. Visualization tools are a fundamental and necessary component of any computational solution as they provide a high bandwidth interface between the human and computer. The DiVE takes this concept one step further, in that the immersive quality of the experience engages the imaginations of people in disciplines that are not traditionally computational.

 

Fostering New Collaborations

The DiVE represents a substantial investment that provides an unparalleled interface between humans and digital worlds. It is precisely the cost and scarcity of this resource that compels researchers to leave their offices and engage in a larger community. Facilities like the DiVE are “watering holes” that bring people together and foster their awareness of one another’s research. Examples of impacts of emergence of rare technical resources on fostering intellectual cross-pollination across distinct sub-specialities exist in all areas of science, such as the phenomenon of large telescopes attracting diverse teams of astronomers and particle accelerators serving as communal spaces for high-energy physicists. However, unlike these domain-specific examples, all researchers require visualization in some form or other. The DiVE is a shared resource that excites the imagination and unites faculty and students from all disciplines.

 

Our Mission:

Ongoing development and refinement of processes for integrating interdisciplinary research, kinesthetic experiences with the arts, undergraduate course offerings and educational enhancement experiences for younger students (grades 9-12) into the DiVE, Duke University’s 6-sided virtual reality theater. Our group enables the application of existing commercial and academic software packages by researchers from any academic discipline at Duke to author rich, immersive, and fully interactive virtual reality (VR) worlds. Existing applications span the realms of visualization, simulation and creative art experiences.

 

Current DiVE projects fall into the following categories:

 

<!--[if !supportLists]--> I. <!--[endif]-->Research

Scientific Visualization and

Cognitive Experiments

 

<!--[if !supportLists]--> II. <!--[endif]-->Education

Undergraduate/Graduate Independent Study Projects

Virtual Reality Technology for Instructional Purposes

Interdisciplinary Course Offerings

Educational Enhancement & Outreach (Grades 9-12)

 

<!--[if !supportLists]--> III. <!--[endif]-->The Arts

 

While projects presented below are categorized on the basis of their primary creation and application within the DiVE, many of these projects have broader application to at least two and sometimes three categories of the categories above. For example, a research project involving scientific visualization at the undergraduate, graduate or faculty research level may involve visualization elements that prove useful as educational enhancement experiences for the many public school students who visit the DiVE annually on field trips. Likewise, a project that begins as research may also emerge as a primary teaching tool for implementation into ongoing graduate or undergraduate course offerings at Duke across interdisciplinary areas which include the humanities, arts, social sciences, and cognitive sciences. Each of these academic areas presents innovative research and educational opportunities that require project-specific development of virtual worlds.

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