PCCAVE : NON-EXPENSIVE CAVE SYSTEM BASED ON NETWORKED PCS

A non expensive CAVE system is constructed by using networked PCs running on Windows2000. The subsystem consists of 4 PCs with low AGP cards to substitute SGI workstations with RealityEngine graphics cards. Whole architecture is master slave. Mater node provides man machine interaction interface and control the whole system while slave nodes receive commands from master node to render stereo images. Its communication system is based on MPI to implement synchronization of parallel computing and intelligent information broker, its graphics API is DirectX and OpenGL. Its performance and bottlenecks are analyzed in this paper. An application is given to walk through the campus of Zhejiang University. Tracking and other interaction devices and 3D audio will be integrated into this system later