CaveUT is a software initially created by Jeffrey Jacobson (Phd student at the University of Pittsburgh - www.PlanetJeff.net). The first CaveUT version enabled us to show an Unreal 3D world in any immersive system thanks to a computers' cluster but with many restrictions. The work done during the ALTERNE project was to add functionalities to the original source code keeping the opensource specificity of the software. To do such a work, we developped a completly new CaveUT version.
Photo of the CLARTE SASCube when the CaveUT was running
The initial CaveUT was redesigned in order to easier configure the systrem and to add two main functionalities :
- stereoscopy
- head tracking
These functionalities are developed so that they be combined : stereoscopy can be added to tracking, we can do tracking without stereoscopy, stereoscopy without tracking or we can use CaveUT as the original one (without tracking and without stereoscopy). All these configuration can be done in a simple configuration file with tokens put to true or false.
We have also developed some other softwares to improve the system.
- We have developed a swaplock protocol to synchronise the computers.
- A network command sender/receiver has been implemented too to control the whole system from a single computer.
- And eventually we have designed a GUI in order to configure each computer from a "control" computer and copy the configuration file on the corresponding computers.
