Acting as a "technopole" which means as a high technology center for economical development, LMT (Laval Mayenne Technopole) has created a virtual reality platform called CLARTE (CLARTE's website). CLARTE, located in Laval - France, was founded to help companies to get skills on VR technologies and to develop new Virtual environments based on immersive and interactive system.
CLARTE works with two main immersive systems:
- the SASCube (a four screens cubic display)
- the Reality Centre (a 12 x 3.4 meters hemi-cylindrical screen)
The SASCube
The Reality Center
Clusters are used in such systems to share the load and get better efficiency with a lower cost than a high computer. CLARTE develops on two different clusters:
- a standard computer based cluster. This cluster is composed by Dell computers, each computer embedding a professional quadbuffer video card which enables genlocking on the whole cluster. To display on a screen we need there only one computer.
- a VR specific cluster. This ORAD cluster uses specific DVG boards to mix video singnals and produce one stereoscopy display (active or passive) with two computers. For instance in the SASCube, we need eight computers to have stereoscopy on each screen (two computers per screen).
Thanks to ALTERNE project, CLARTE has worked on Unreal Tournament technology and more specifically on CaveUT2K3 and became part of the UDN (Unreal Developer Network). CLARTE has implemented stereoscopy on this new release of the software in order to produce an outstanding total immersion experience. This involves implementation of trackers so that the perspective is modified according to the position of the user. The schedule of this work has been the following:
- CaveUT2k3 implemented: Autumn 2003
- Stereoscopy implemented: Spring 2004
- Trackers integration: Summer 2004
Key Personel
Guy Le Bras director of LMT(lebras@laval-technopole.fr)
Director of Laval Mayenne Technopole
He has been Head of the Office of the Mayor of Laval (Mayenne), Minister of Research, between 1995 and 1997 and special advisor of the French Minister of Transports between 2003 and 2004. He began his career as Responsible for the Relations between Renault Industrial Vehicles and The World Bank. He received his Civil Mining Engineer diploma in 1982 from the National School of Mines of Saint-Etienne and his M.S. in Economic Science from the University of Saint-Etienne in 1981. Guy Le Bras is also member of the board of directors of the International Association of Science Parks.
Jean-Louis Dautin director of CLARTE (dautin@esiea-ouest.fr)
Engineer ISEP (Institut Supérieur d'Electronique de Paris)
Responsible for engineering & design department in a telecommunication company during 15 years.
Today, responsible for the virtual reality department at ESIEA Ouest & director of CLARTE
Marc Le Renard teacher and VR engineer (lerenard@esiea-ouest.fr)
Engineer ESIEA
Employed since april 2002 as computer science teacher at ESIEA Ouest in Laval and Virtual Reality Engineer for CLARTE.
