We present the design of Brown University's new Cave, which is expected to be fully operational in February 2014. With one arc-minute resolution, 3.8 π steradians of visual surround, head-tracked stereo, and an almost seamless screen, this Cave offers advances to the state-of-the-art virtual reality experience. This improvement is achieved with the installation of 69 high-resolution long throw projectors, a cylindrical screen with conical ceiling, and a 135 square foot rear-projection floor. Though Caves have been around for over 20 years, they have remained impractical for many potential uses due to their limited resolution, brightness, and overall immersion. Brown's new Cave aims to bridge this gap.

The IBM Scalable Graphics Engine-3 (SGE-3) prototype is a network attached framebuffer. In its application at Brown, it is a pixel compositor for distributed rendering and a video source for frame-sequential stereo display in a four-wall CAVE™ -like display, a TAN VR-Cube. The configuration uses 4 SGE-3 prototype units (one per display wall) and 48 rendering nodes (12 per display wall; 6 per stereo field). With favorable rendering distribution, achieved performance per 12-node wall has been up to five times that of a single graphics card. This report provides details of the cluster systems architecture and the performance characteristics of the SGE-3 and sample test applications.