Cave automatic virtual environment

The name is also a reference to the allegory of the Cave in Plato's Republic in which a philosopher contemplates perception, reality, and illusion.

The CAVE was invented by Carolina Cruz-Neira, Daniel J. Sandin, and Thomas A. DeFanti at the University of Illinois, Chicago Electronic Visualization Laboratory in 1992.

The walls of a CAVE are typically made up of rear-projection screens, however large-scale LED displays are becoming more common.

The projection systems are very high-resolution due to the near distance viewing which requires very small pixel sizes to retain the illusion of reality.

People using the CAVE can see objects apparently floating in the air, and can walk around them, getting a proper view of what they would look like in reality.

The frame of early CAVEs had to be built from non-magnetic materials such as wood to minimize interference with the electromagnetic sensors; the change to infrared tracking has removed that limitation.

A CAVE user's movements are tracked by the sensors typically attached to the 3D glasses and the video continually adjusts to retain the viewers perspective.

The computers rapidly generate a pair of images, one for each of the user's eyes, based on the motion capture data.

[8] Similar to the original CAVE, it is a 3D immersive environment but is based on LCD panels rather than projection.