Abstract Implementation of stereo tiled displays is a rather demanding task. In this article we want to share the lessons we have learned during the design and construction of the ICWall tiled display. This large display, used in a classroom setting, is a high‐resolution stereo tiled display (2 × 8 tiles), built from low‐cost commodity components. The overall image is produced by an array of projectors. When building such a system, a key challenge is to align the projector images. We describe our automated approach for alignment/calibration of the left‐ and right‐eye stereo images. We provide measurements that show accuracy of this procedure. We explain and compare two calibration approaches: a single‐pass and a two‐pass rendering method to align the tiled images. We explain how to provide seamless image on the tiled display and which issues have to be solved. We also discuss the depth perception issues on the ICWall for the large audiences. Another important aspect, is the architecture of the software used for PC‐cluster‐based rendering. We describe Aura, the parallel scene graph API that is used for rendering on our tiled display. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We present the CAVEStudy system that enables scientists to interactively steer a simulation from a virtual reality (VR) environment. No modification to the source code is necessary. CAVEStudy allows interactive and immersive analysis of a simulation running on a remote computer. Using a high-level description of the simulation, the system generates the communication layer (based on CAVERN-Soft) needed to control the execution and to gather data at runtime. We describe three case-studies implemented with CAVEStudy: soccer simulation, diode laser simulation and molecular dynamics.

We discuss the use of virtual reality (VR) techniques for interaction between humans and a multi-agent system in the context of RoboCup. The goal of RoboCup is to let teams of cooperating autonomous agents play a soccer match, using either robots or simulated players. We use RoboCup to study distributed collaborative applications, which allow multiple users at different geographic locations to cooperate, by interacting in real time through a shared simulation program. Our objective is to construct a VR environment in which humans at different locations can play along with a running RoboCup simulation in a natural way. The simulation system consists of the Soccer Server and a set of processes modeling the players. The server keeps track of the state of the game: provides the players with information on the game, and enforces the rules. The players request state information and autonomously calculate a behavior, sending the server commands that consist of accelerations, turns and kicks. The server discretizes time into slots, only one command is executed per time slot. We have developed a 3D visualization system that allows a user in a CAVE to interact with the soccer simulation software.