Immersive Stereo Projection Systems

The renderer can be configured for all kind of backprojection based displays like Workbench, Powerwall, CYKLOOP, CAVE, Reality Centre, Visdome. COVER supports active stereo video formats with shutter glasses as well as passive stereo with polarized glasses. On SGI systems, multiple graphics pipes can be used to drive a CAVE or Powerwall. On Linux two PCs per display channel can be combined for passive stereo displays. Each PC renders one eye; rendering is synchronised via a serial cable. Data is distributed via a fast network.

Navigation

For navigation in the virtual scene COVER supports head tracking. This means that the position and orientation of the users head is determined and used to compute the appropriate view on the scene. The 3D input device contains a sensor and one and three buttons. The sensor measures position and orientation of the hand. Distant objects, can be reached by a virtual laser beam. Navigation and manipulation modes can be selected via a 3D menu with the laser beam. For navigation the user can grab and move or scale the whole scene. For architectural walkthroughs a walk, drive and fly mode is available. Objects in the scene can be selected, moved and removed. For animated scenes the user can control the animation speed and also attach the viewer to a moving object (steady cam).

Views on the scene can be saved and restored.

The standard visualisation modules of COVISE (e.g. CuttingSurface, IsoSurface, particle tracer) can be controlled from within COVER. The user can select a cuttingplane interaction, move a symbolic plane with the 3D input device to the de-sired position and then restart the COVISE module with the new coordinates. He can also define amongst others the startpoints for streamlines with the 3d input device.
COVER works also standalone as a viewer for 3D geometry formats. Here the renderer reads the geometry directly. The supported formats include VRML1, VRML2, OBJ, CSB.

In order to assure an efficient use of COVISE VR, VirCinity offers a 1-day comprehensive training.