QAVE – a Game-Based Immersive Virtual Reality System

In this paper we present the QAVE (Quake Automatic Virtual Environment) system that we developed based on the computer game Quake III Arena. The QAVE system is an immersive CAVE-like virtual reality system. The system uses the open source Quake 3 game engine that was adapted to run and display the virtual world, and the open source computer vision library OpenCV to perform optical tracking of the QAVE users, which makes the system very cost-effective. The use of a computer game as the basis for the QAVE system means that it is able to take advantage of the content and tools created for the game and provide rich and dynamic worlds for the system’ s users. The QAVE system demonstrates that computer games are a viable platform for scientific research, especially in the development of virtual reality applications.