Jeffrey Jacobson and Michael Lewis, University of Pittsburgh

CaveUT, an open source freeware project, uses game technology to make immersive projection-based virtual reality affordable and accessible.

Relatively simple, the current public release of CaveUT works well for low-cost displays. The most advanced version, which will be publicly available in the fall of 2005, supports real-time spatial tracking and stereographic imaging. It is currently installed and working in the SAS-Cube, a CAVE-like display.

Computer games with the most advanced simulation and graphics usually employ a game engine, a commercially available software package that handles basic functions. For example, the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament for the PC employs the Unreal Engine to provide richly detailed graphics, high-speed processing performance, a built-in physics engine, a scripting language interpreter, and robust networking for shared environments.

CaveUT modifies Unreal Tournament to let it display in multiscreen enclosures suitable for immersive virtual reality applications. VR applications developed with CaveUT inherit all the Unreal Engine's capabilities along with Unreal Tournament's authoring support, open source code, content library, and large user community. Movie Demo , Article in IEEE Computer Magazine