Two of the most popular mediums for virtual reality are head-mounted displays and surround-screen projection systems, such as CAVE Automatic Virtual Environments. In recent years, HMDs suffered a significant reduction in cost and have become widespread consumer products. In contrast, CAVEs are still expensive and remain accessible to a limited number of researchers. This study aims to evaluate both objective and subjective characteristics of a CAVE-like monoscopic low-cost virtual reality surround-screen projection system compared to advanced setups and HMDs. For objective results, we measured the head position estimation accuracy and precision of a low-cost active infrared (IR) based tracking system, used in the proposed low-cost CAVE, relatively to an infrared marker-based tracking system, used in a laboratory-grade CAVE system. For subjective characteristics, we investigated the sense of presence and cybersickness elicited in users during a visual search task outside personal space, beyond arms reach, where the importance of stereo vision is diminished. Thirty participants rated their sense of presence and cybersickness after performing the VR search task with our CAVE-like system and a modern HMD. The tracking showed an accuracy error of 1.66 cm and .4 mm of precision jitter. The system was reported to elicit presence but at a lower level than the HMD, while causing significant lower cybersickness. Our results were compared to a previous study performed with a laboratory-grade CAVE and support that a VR system implemented with low-cost devices could be a viable alternative to laboratory-grade CAVEs for visual search tasks outside the user's personal space.

While CAVE Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVE) have been around for over 2 decades they remain complex to setup, unaffordable to most, and generally limited to data and model visualization applications for academia and industry. In this paper, we present a solution to create a monocular CAVE using the Unity 3D game engine by adding motion parallax and full-body interaction support via the use of a Kinect V2 low-cost sensor. More importantly, we provide a functional and easy to use plugin for that effect, the KAVE, and its configuration tool. Here, we describe our own low-cost CAVE setup, a range of alternative configurations to CAVE systems using this technology and example applications. Finally, we discuss the potential of such an approach considering the current advancements in VR and gaming.