The SunCAVE, the World’s Highest Resolution Walk-in Virtual Reality Environment, Turns Two
Tucked into a cozy-feeling room on the first floor of the UC San Diego's Qualcomm Institute are 70 screens, bundles of cables and 35 computer nodes that make up a powerful system that can process massive amounts of data transmitted over the Internet from researchers all over the US or even Antarctica.
It can also take you, virtually, into worlds as varied as a temple in Egypt, an ancient copper smelting site in Jordan or an underwater cave system on the Yucatan Peninsula. Or even into the abdomen of Crohn’s disease patients.
Front and center in the room is a 360-degree sphere-like scaffolding covered in screens called the SunCAVE—the world’s highest resolution walk-in virtual reality (VR) environment.
Two years ago this summer, the Qualcomm Institute’s CAVE (or Cave Automated Virtual Environment) morphed from the StarCAVE, as it was known, into the SunCAVE. Its physical shape changed, as did the technology running it behind the scenes.
“The fact that we can use 35 PCs and 70 game-class graphics cards (GPUs) and memory together makes it a computer cluster that also happens to immerse you in realistic 3D pictures, algorithmic visualizations, and even MRI-scans of human brains and other organs,” he said.
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