Physics Based CAVE Virtual Reality

Abstract

The term Virtual Reality (VR) is used by many different people with many meanings. For the purposes of this paper, we restrict VR to computer mediated systems. Virtual Reality is a way for humans to visualize, manipulate and interact with computers and extremely complex data. The visualization part refers to the computer generating visual, auditory or other sensual outputs to the user of a world within the computer. This world may be a CAD model, a scientific simulation, or a view into a database. The user can interact with the world and directly manipulate objects within the world. Some worlds are animated by other processes, perhaps physical simulations, or simple animation scripts. Interaction with the virtual world, at least with near real-time control of the viewpoint, is one of the most important aspects for virtual reality. A Virtual Reality Cave Automatic Virtual Environnlent (CAVE) is an immersive, three-dimensional visualization environment that allows scientists and engineers to interact directly with computer generated images. The visualization environment can be used to efficiently analyze and modify numerical computer simulations, interactively design prototypes for industrial applications, and remotely control robots for telepresence. An often overlooked problem in virtual environments is the physical laws that define the world. Although work has shown that physically based modeling techniques greatly enhance an immersion experience, an easy to use library has not been developed. The interactions of different forces and how these forces affect everything within the user created world should not be ignored as is the case in many current applications. When physics is included in virtual reality applications, the code is usually developed by the programmer from scratch, taking much time and resources. The work here describes a first step toward a possible solution to such problems. This work allows users to easily implement physical laws within a digitally created environment.