A Small-scale, Low-budget Semi-immersive Virtual Environment for Scientific Visualization and Research

Abstract

This paper describes the design concepts, the making of and some applications of the first Estonian Virtual Reality Environment. Using hardware only slightly above the threshold of consumer level, we built a virtual environment (VE) aimed at scientific visualization with the lowest possible space requirements (smaller than a cube with 2 m edge length in total) and budget (approximately below 30.000 €). The system is a fully functional visualization environment that replicates most of the features and properties of a real-sized CAVE-like System, therefore allowing further prototyping and research in the field of Virtual Reality.