Virtual Reality Art is most often presented in the form of installations using immersive displays, such as the CAVE™. The ALTERNE platform is based on the SAS Cube™, which is a 4-wall, PC-based, CAVE™-like, immersive visualisation system.
The ALTERNE platform aims at providing a high level of integration between various techniques supporting Mixed Reality, graphics, interaction and behavioural models. This platform will directly support artistic VR installations, with which spectators can interact directly — though the physical size of the installation will always limit the number of spectators interacting with the system — and remotely, using different types of lightweight clients.
Photograph of the SAS Cube™. © CLARTE/LMT.
We use a game engine, Unreal Tournament 2003™, as a visualisation engine as well as a development environment. Game engines are now increasingly used for visualisation in scientific research due to their rendering performance and their ability to communicate with external software modules, which in the present case was essential to the development of a simulation layer that will override basic physics mechanism to implement Alternative Reality.
In addition, game engines also support the creative content creation process by importing 3D models and animation from popular software packages.
The UT 2003™ engine has been ported to the SAS-Cube™ hardware using the Cave-UT™ software (http://planetjeff.net/ut/CaveUT.html), which ensures the hardware/software integration for the whole platform.
One of the Alternative Reality test worlds in the SAS Cube™
