University of California in San Diego develops a virtual reality world called StarCAVE.

Calit2 visualization researchers surrounded by proteins from the Protein Data Bank in the StarCAVE virtual reality environment at the University of California in San Diego.

What is the StarCAVE?
The StarCAVE at the University of California, San Diego is a  virtual-reality environment which allows groups of scientists to explore worlds as big as the cosmos and as small as nanoparticles. This 360-degree VR room offers a fully immersive 3-D experience: Users of this virtual reality can interact with the visuals on the 360-degree display by pointing a “wand” which results in flying through the 3-D images and zoom in or out. The exact position of the wand and the user is determined by a multi-camera wireless tracking system.

What are the technical specifications?
The StarCAVE is a five-sided virtual reality (VR) room. In this virtual world, scientific animations and models can be projected in stereo on 360-degree screens surrounding the viewer, and onto the floor as well. Thanks to the room’s unique shape and special screens which allow viewers to use 3-D polarizing glasses, the images are very high contrast. The StarCAVE is also equipped with a surround sound system, which uses wave field synthesis which is a way to maximize the perception of many channels of sound emanating from different sides of the room.

Who uses this virtual world and what for?
Early users of the StarCAVE include UC San Diego researchers in biomedicine, neuroscience, structural engineering, archaeology, earth science, genomics, art history and other disciplines. One can for example navigate through the superstructure of a building to detect where damage from an earthquake may have occurred or fly over a strand of DNA and look in front, behind and below oneself.

What’s the history of the StarCAVE?
The StarCAVE represents the third generation of surround-VR rooms. The original Cave Automated Virtual Environment (CAVE) has been developed at the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1991. The standard surround-VR technology is now the second-generation model, which was built ten years later at EVL. It is widely used around the world and marketed by Mechdyne Corp. Previous generations of  these virtual environments used powered shutter glasses for the 3D effect. The StarCAVE lets you use the lightweight polarized glasses which lead to a more enjoyable, natural-feeling third dimension experience.

Where was it constructed and what were the costs?
It was constructed by the UC San Diego division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). At less than $1 million, the StarCAVE immersive environment costs about the same as earlier VR systems. Still it offers much higher resolution and contrast.

Who are the creators of the StarCAVE virtual world?
Thomas A. DeFanti, director of visualization at Calit2 and his co-authors include Gregory Dawe, Peter Otto, Jurgen P. Schulze, Falko Kuester, Javier Girado,  Ramesh Rao, Larry Smarr and others at  UC San Diego. Furthermore Daniel J. Sandin of the University of Illinois at Chicago’s Electronic Visualization Lab (EVL), and Javier Girado (now at Qualcomm Inc.).

More about the Starcave virtual reality world:
Universityofcalifornia.edu - starcave virtual reality

Several 3D-Worlds already exist and they are turning into increasingly realistic spaces.

Gary Hayes video ‘The Social Virtual World’s A Stage’ impressively demonstrates how popular,  ubiquitous and progressive many of these virtual spaces already are, and gives us an apprehension how cyberspace will look like in a few years. (© Personalizemedia 2008)

The virtual worlds portrayed in Gary Hayes video: Second Life, HiPiHi, Kaneva, Twinity, ActiveWorlds, LagunaBeach vMTV. There.com, Habbo, Google Lively, FootballSuperstars, Weblin, AmazingWorlds, CyWorld, Whyville, Gaia Online, RocketOn, Club Penguin, YoVille, Webkinz, BarbieGirls, Prototerra, IMVU, Spore, vSide, Tale in the Desert, SpineWorld, Stardoll, The Manor, There.com, ExitReality, Vastpark, Qwaq, PS3Home, GoSupermodel, Grockit, Croquet, Metaplace, Coke Studios, Dreamville, Dubit, Mokitown, Moove, Muse, The Palace, Playdo, Sora City, Voodoo Chat, TowerChat, Traveler, Virtual Ibiza

Internet’s current major evolution: 3D Web leads to the establishment of virtual worlds.
Web3D is the basis for these virtual worlds, in which people are represented visually by avatars that can move in space, communicate with others, and interact with objects and information - making the digital world more and more similar to the real world. Some virtual worlds are demonstrating the precursor to smooth natural motion and photo-realistic rendering of objects, avatars and landscapes. Others focus more on the social networking aspects and provide intimacy with your friends in more artificial environments.

How will virtual worlds of the future look like?
Virtual 3D-worlds of the future will be all-encompassing, often photo-realistic, digital playgrounds. People will spend a lot of time in virtual space, using high quality, 3D, immersive, computer generated environments to socialise and do business in. Age, race, gender and the other inescapable ‘realities’ of life will be overcome by the ever increasing creative freedom possible in more and more highly advanced virtual worlds. We will be able to continuously immerse (and possibly lose…) ourselves in a fantastic always-on matrix of digital information.

What will we be able to do in the cyberspace of the future?
Pretty soon, avatars (the virtual representations of yourself in the cyberspace) will mirror your physical movements as Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, points out:

Cameras are being built into all the latest laptops and that technology is becoming pretty ubiquitous. So, one thing that will happen within the next year or two is that whenever you turn on the camera on your computer, we will be able to watch your body, head, and hands and we can match your avatar’s movements to yours.

So if you’re in front of any camera-enabled computer, looking from left to right, nodding your head, or gesturing - we’ll be able to reach out, look at what you’re doing and make your avatar move the same way. That’s going to be an amazing improvement in the interface.

Later on, avatars will look, react, and behave even more like real persons. Imagine a degree of realism when technology gives you a life-size 3D image which is linked to your nervous system: It will for example allow you to shake hands, which will feel like being in the other person’s office. The matrix will become real!

As the internet becomes intertwined with the real world, the resulting Geoweb is another important stepping stone for the rise of the 3D Internet.

Geoweb (or The ‚Geospatial Web’) stands for the merging of geographical (location-based) information with the mainly abstract information that is currently found on the internet.

Geowebbing is about a reordering of the internet around a geographic interface. Geography and location become more and more important to index information.

This creates an environment where people can search for things based on location instead of by keyword only. The geoweb will allow users to perform searches without even having a need to type in keywords - one will be able to just browse around in a digital map.

Virtual globes or Geobrowsers such as Google Earth and NASA World Wind as well as mapping websites such as Yahoo Maps, Google Maps and Microsoft Live Search Maps (Live Local 3D) have been major factors in raising the interest in the Geoweb.

John Hanke, head of Google’s Earth and Maps division:

Geography is another way, a different way, to organise information. As human beings, we inherently understand geography.
Google Earth is turning into a map of historical significance. It is going to be a map of the world that is more detailed than any map that’s ever been created.

(John Hanke)

More and more real world data is being combined with virtual geographical data which results in exciting possibilities to make our lives easier: Locate nearby restaurants, get driving directions, or find your friends in a foreign city through your social communities.

If someone is going to a night club and wants to find related places and things of interest nearby, such as a hotel, it is usually more logical and more intuitive to search by location than to do a regular keyword-based search.

Mobile Geoweb and Geobrowser
Soon, we will see the mobile world jumping in: On location-aware mobile phones and personal digital assistants, people will be able to use digital maps and geobrowsers to find information about relevant places which are geographically closest and which are of the greatest interest to the user: Ask for a restaurant and your device will show you where you can finde the nearest one. It will indicate you directions directly on your GPS and even an option to book a table by text message.

The Geospatial Web will have a dramatic impact on managing knowledge, structuring workflows within and across organizations, and communicating with like-minded individuals in virtual communities. It will bring together people of similar interests, browsing behavior, or geographic location. Placeopedia for example combines knowledge (Wikipedia articles) with Google Maps. Flickrvision shows photos at the geographical location right where they were created.

Post-it notes on Web documents
The new Geoweb, or the reordering of the Internet around a geographic interface, will however only work if information on the Web is indexed geographically. This can be done by adding computer-readable tags to documents which indicate the locations to which they refer. Mike Liebhold, a fellow at Silicon Valley’s Institute for the Future, likens this process to “sticking Post-it notes on to Web documents.”

It is estimated that 60 to 80 percent of Web pages have geographically relevant information that can be indexed. The more detailed the geographical representations of the planet will be created, the more inventive and exciting the interplay between the virtual world and the real world will become.

The future of the Geoweb: Fully immersive virtual reality.
The goal of the Geoweb can be seen as the creation of a fully immersive digital environment, or virtual reality that mirrors our own reality. This would greatly improve our understanding of the world and its processes, allowing us to better manage our resources, find nearby services, meet people, and have fun.

Digital Earth by Al Gore
Digital Earth was a label given to a visionary concept by former US vice president Al Gore in 1998. He described a virtual representation of the Earth on the Internet that is spatially referenced and interconnected with the world’s digital knowledge archives.

Geoweb is gradually turning into this digital earth and will soon become the interface to just about everything users do on the Internet. It is one of the most important stepping stones towards the future digital playground called 3D Internet.

(www.internet3d.org)