Pictures from the CAVE

These are pictures taken on November 11, 1999 in the CAVE at NCSA where we were testing out VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics) the molecular visualization software that I develop at the Beckman Institute. After we all played with VMD for a while, we spontaneously realized that we should be taking pictures of it with Kirby's digital camera since we didn't have any pictures of VMD in the CAVE yet. (we had already been running it for an hour, so the picture taking was the last thing we did.) Once we got tired of playing with VMD, we decided to relax with some CAVE Quake :-)

The images on the walls appear blurry to the digital camera, because they are stereoscopic images which are updated 120 times per second. This is much faster than the exposure time of the camera that took the pictures. Also, when you use the CAVE, you normally wear active LCD shutter glasses which alternately polarize the left and right eyes, causing each eye to see only its own custom image, so that the user sees the "world" in stereo. Since the camera wasn't "wearing" the LCD shutter glasses like we were, it sees both images at once, so several frames of the 3D images are blurred together in these pictures. We may end up trying this again sometime, with faster exposure times.

The best pictures:
Jeff standing in the CAVE waiting.
Kirby running VMD
Kirby running VMD
John (me) running VMD
John (me) running VMD
Buttonfly
Jim wishing that the CAVE had gesture recognition
Dave and Jim standing in the CAVE waiting for something to happen.
Jim getting ready to play CAVE Quake II
Jim playing CAVE Quake II
Jim playing CAVE Quake II
Dave playing CAVE Quake II
Jeff playing CAVE Quake II
Jeff playing CAVE Quake II
John (me) playing CAVE Quake II
Kirby playing CAVE Quake II
Kirby dying in CAVE Quake II
Dave playing CAVE Quake II