USA Today 11/03/98- Updated 12:29 AM ET The Nation's Homepage Business world exploring CAVEs CHICAGO -- While a lot of people are preoccupied with the launch of high-definition TV this week, want a glimpse of what might come next? Stop in at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago, trudge through the long, echoing concrete halls and there you can see a CAVE, which stands for Cave Automated Virtual Environment. A CAVE is about the size of a walk-in closet. Step inside, put on 3-D glasses, and suddenly you become part of a computer animation, sort of like a Star Trek holodeck in its developmental infancy. Virtual reality is all around you. By using an electronic wand, you can interact with it. Then listen to lab director Tom DeFanti describe the trajectory of CAVE technology a couple of decades into the future, when a CAVE might sit in your family room like a next-next-generation big-screen TV. Beaming into the CAVE could be a virtual-reality broadcast of a football game. Long gone would be the days of watching football from the viewpoint of a camera perched high in the stands. In the CAVE era, you would watch from the field. Maybe sitting on the line of scrimmage between two angry 300-pound players. With a bowl of popcorn. "It's only a question of computing power," DeFanti says, with a mischievous glint. "We're going to get there." Of course the home CAVE sounds like wild speculation. But CAVE technology is real. It's been around since DeFanti and his colleagues invented it in 1991-92. In the intervening years, the CAVE was mostly a lab curiosity -- too expensive, too full of glitches and too delicate for anything but experiments and flashy demonstrations. But in the past year or so, the CAVE has moved toward the edge of mainstream. It's gone commercial. The visualization lab stabilized the software, which has won it acceptance as a standard for this kind of "immersive virtual reality." A company called VRCO, started last summer by graduates of the visualization lab, has set up business as a CAVE software vendor. Pyramid Systems in Southfield, Mich., has licensed CAVE technology and become the leading seller of CAVE hardware, including a more compact version of the CAVE called an ImmersaDesk, which is about the size of a picture window. Silicon Graphics makes high-powered computers for CAVEs. Hewlett-Packard in September launched its own immersive technology business. There are more than 100 CAVEs at universities, government facilities and companies, including General Motors and NASA. They help engineers see 3-D, full-size models of cars and enable scientists to walk inside models of single molecules. "We're hitting the threshold of companies saying it's not just whiz-bang, but it's a cost-effective solution" for certain kinds of projects, says Matthew Szymanski, a founder of VRCO. Adds Bill Lackner of Pyramid: "In 1999, we should see a pretty good increase in sales to the commercial market." Most every CAVE does its work as a stand-alone device, like a personal computer that doesn't connect to the Internet. But researchers are making serious headway in the next phase of CAVE development: CAVE-to-CAVE communication. Sending 3-D immersive images the way Internet users send Web pages should goose the CAVE business. Last year, in a test of CAVE-to-CAVE, 17 people in separate CAVEs around the world did the Hokey-Pokey together. A 'virtual' beginning DeFanti and visualization lab colleague Daniel Sandin started thinking about CAVEs after seeing a head-mounted virtual reality helmet at a conference in 1991. A helmet presents some problems. For instance, it's disorienting because you can't see your surroundings. And you can't share the VR experience -- only the person wearing the helmet can see it. DeFanti and Sandin wanted to create a way for several people at once to walk through a virtual building or work on a 3-D model. "We wanted a better human-computer interface, one that matches the way humans interact with the world," Sandin says. The first CAVEs ran on monstrously expensive supercomputers and existed only in such places as Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois and major computer-research universities. But it wasn't long before some companies got interested. Among the first, in about 1993, were General Motors and Caterpillar. Both saw CAVEs as a way to build and manipulate models of new vehicles without having to make costly physical models. Over the years, the computers needed to run CAVEs got smaller, cheaper and much more powerful. Constant programming work made the software better. Interestingly, the CAVE itself is the one part of the equation that hasn't changed much, says Pyramid's Lackner. A stainless-steel skeleton holds up screens that make up three walls of the room. The fourth side is open. Around the top of the screen are stereo projectors that create the image. The glasses can be outfitted with a tiny radio transmitter that tracks you so the CAVE knows where you are and what you're looking at -- and can change the image accordingly if, say, you sit in the driver's seat of a car and stick your head out the window. These days, an ImmersaDesk can run on a $100,000 Silicon Graphics Onyx computer. A full-size CAVE requires a version that costs more like $1 million, DeFanti says. A complete CAVE setup would cost around $1.5 million. An ImmersaDesk, which gives good 3-D but doesn't quite conjure up the feeling of being inside the display, costs about $150,000. For those prices, a company or lab can get some truly amazing capabilities. "We can get full-size images that are quite realistic and can be viewed by multiple people in a constructive decision-making process," says Bob Tilove in General Motors' research and development lab. The models in CAVEs are a little cartoonish -- more like computer-game animation and not quite up to the realism of computer-generated movies such as Toy Story. But the images are good enough to see not only what the outside of a car might look like, but also what it's like to sit inside it. The CAVE models can directly save money. In the past, Tilove says, GM might have built five different models of a new car. Now, "We can look at the alternatives in a virtual environment and rule out three of five and only build the two." Caterpillar also uses CAVEs in design. It can virtually drive a new tractor to see if it operates as expected. The Searle division of Monsanto is developing a version of CAVE technology that can design the floor layout of a manufacturing plant. A Norwegian oil company uses a CAVE to model geological data. Geologists can then go underground themselves and "look" for likely oil reserves. VRCO says it's starting to get inquiries from architectural firms, which want to enable a client to walk through a building before it's built. In universities, researchers have used CAVEs to go inside a hurricane, fly through the Milky Way and peek into never-before-seen corners of single molecules. At Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., oceanographer Glen Wheless has created a CAVE model of the Chesapeake Bay. He can look at tides, winds and storms from an aerial view, from anywhere on the bay or from underwater. Wheless can thoroughly explore the Chesapeake on his own while in his wheelchair. The CAVEs have led to a National Science Foundation study called the Every Citizen Interface. "Twenty or 30 years from now, you're not going to want to give up computer access just because you can't see so well or your fingers don't work," DeFanti says. The project is looking at ways to get around that -- and also to make computers more accessible to children, the blind or anyone else who might have trouble with a mouse, screen and keyboard. CAVE-style virtual reality might be an answer. Immersed in the future Beyond that, possible uses for CAVE technology get as wild as the notion of having a sporting event played out in your family room. How about immersive movies? Imagine Saving Private Ryan, except you're on the battlefield, not watching it from a seat. Video games would take on a whole new dimension, literally. Video phones would seem tired; the truly wired would have 3-D immersion phones. For the office, DeFanti proposes the tele-cubicle. If you're going to sit in a walled box anyway, why not turn the box into a CAVE? "Walk in, turn it on and you could be anywhere," DeFanti says. Have a virtual meeting with colleagues from around the world. Or manage a factory floor by virtually walking around. How far out is all that? No telling. But keep in mind that the supercomputers of 15 years ago were less powerful than today's $1,000 Pentium computers. So the technology needed for CAVEs -- so out of reach for a consumer today -- could fall fast. And as CAVE technology spreads, more research will go into making it better. "Our goal is to make it better than being there," DeFanti says. "Right now, it's just better than getting there." Along the way, immersive technology research could take some funky turns. "One of the problems with CAVEs is you're dealing only with the visual," says GM's Tilove. "People get a lot of information from the tactile. We see that as a key challenge -- to make it tactile, too. To actually be able to touch and manipulate things in a virtual environment." Such a development might make you rethink the viewpoint from which you will see the football game. By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY ©COPYRIGHT 1998 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.