Overview

Otherwise known as the CAVES project. Our goal was to create low-cost VR authoring tools and platforms which enabled non-VR experts to create virtual environments. The SA government gave us a lot of money and we produced some really great tools and demonstrations. Due to shifting funding agencies and complications with development partners, a lot of what we did has been tied down in copyright arguments.

The upshot of that is that we could not publish a lot of what we did. That is being rectified now and you will shortly see papers appearing on this work. For me, the most exciting thing we did was create a methodology and a piece of software that allows porgrammers, artists and designers to communicate in an effective way. This is a huge problem and we think we may have solved it (for VR applciations at least).

People

CAVES Director - Edwin Blake

Grad students I worked with (there were other, graphics-related people) - Zayd Hendricks, Jak Tangkuampien, Shih-Min Yang, Charlene Elliot, Hendranus Vermullen, Marion Walton, Ilda Ladeira, Sarah Brown, Cara Winterbottom and Dave Nunez

Publications

Hendricks Z., Marsden G. & Blake E.H. (2003) "A Meta-Authoring Tool for Specifying Interactions in Virtual Reality Environments", Proceedings of Afrigraph 2003, ACM Press, pp 171–180 (PDF 284k)

Marsden, G. & Yang, S. (2004) "Eliminating Design and Execute Modes from Virtual Environment Editors" Presence 2004, full paper. (Electronic proceedings) (PDF)

Downloads

Can't give you the software but we have an introductory video that may be of interest.