This Virtual Reality Solution Helped Higher Education Researchers Retain Data

At Marquette University, researchers were throwing away important data, but not on purpose.

John LaDisa says researchers like him needed a solution that would help them maintain, manipulate and dig deeper into their data.

That solution was an 18 feet by nine feet immersive Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) by Christie Digital.

“The need came from people like me who realized that they were really not using, and throwing away most of the data they were working so hard to obtain,” says LaDisa, director of the Visualization Lab and associate professor of biomedical engineering at Marquette University. “People wanted to get more information from what they were doing and didn’t have the ability to expose the data in the way that they wanted.”

Marquette University’s CAVE features:

• 3 walls

• 10 Christie Mirages Series projectors

• An embedded Christie Twist for edge blending

• 3D stereo glasses

The CAVE can also support up to 30 users, with the ability to collaborate on content in “split-mode.”

Aside from boosting research capabilities, LaDisa says the CAVE is a multidisciplinary tool, and that students can use it for their own work.

850 students have used the CAVE since Marquette University installed it two years ago.

“Given the potentially high cost of the system, we wanted to look across campus to see what other end users might be interested in using this system for their given applications,” he says. “It’s a research lab in its core…but it’s also used for teaching, industry collaborations and outreach. We have many students involved doing research, and we provide educational experiences [with it].”

LaDisa also says the CAVE is used to prepare students for the real world.

For example, he says the CAVE has been used as a mock medical setting for nursing students.

Even though the solution creates a digital workspace for students to practice in, it still provides them with cues on how a particular setting would look or what a certain work experience feels like.

LaDisa says the 3D stereo glasses help with this.

“When you go into an immersive system like this, we put on these glasses so you have the depth cues in the physical world,” he says. “If you can create scenarios that bring more depth cues from the physical world, and you can train within them, you get more of that realism.”