Joanna Mason, Marek Czernuszenko, Dana Plepys ,Thomas A. DeFanti 

 Electronic Visualization Laboratory 


University of Illinois at Chicago

Abstract

CAVEview is an interactive tool for exploring virtual reality applications over the Internet, via Mosaic. Mosaic currently uses external viewers to present hypertext documents with images, text, sounds and animation. With CAVEview, virtual reality applications can be inserted into hypertext documents. CAVEview operates like other external viewers by bringing data files over the network; however, the transferred data is an application object file. The object file fully describes the environment, thus allowing the user to explore the scene for an unlimited amount of time.

Accessing application program files lets the user have control over the story. This is in sharp contrast to being able to upload and view animations where the exploration of the scene is restricted to a fixed interval of a pre-recorded sequence. To attain a variation of that sequence, the animator would have to add more frames increasing the size of the data file that must be transferred. CAVEview adds stereo realism, interactivity and sound to viewing 3D objects in Mosaic, without the cost of large animation files.

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