Spelunking: Experiences using the DIVE System on CAVE-like Platforms

Abstract

The Distributed Interactive Virtual Environment (DIVE) system is a mature toolkit that has been used for prototyping many collaborative virtual environment (CVE) applications [3]. Until recently, support for immersive systems has been limited to custom support for specific installations and the emphasis has been on broad support for desktop interfaces. Recently we have ported DIVE to the CAVElib™ environment† and this paper describes application programming support for immersive users and our experience in using wide-area distributed applications involving immersive projection technologies. The resulting toolkit provides a very flexible system with which to build distributed VE applications involving a variety of platforms and interfaces.