“Building an Affordable Projective, Immersive Display” by Pape and Anstey

Immersive, interactive virtual reality is a tool with hypothetically limitless uses. However, so far it has been put to serious use primarily in technical application areas such as computational science, automotive engineering, and chemical exploration. Groups working in these fields often have large budgets and can afford expensive, advanced displays. VR should also be of value to schools and museums, but most of them have much smaller budgets than major research labs, or are not able to support high-end graphics workstations. A simple, affordable, projection based display system can make VR far more accessible. In schools, displays could be put into individual classrooms and not just a central computer lab. In the museum world, small institutions would be capable of showing cutting edge digital work that previously has been restricted to a few large museums.

This workshop describes the construction of a single screen, passive stereo, VR display based on commodity, or otherwise low-cost, components. There are many options available for the major elements of such a system and the basic system can be modified or adapted to many different styles of use. Figure 1 shows a photo of such a system in use at the University at Buffalo.