Multiple viewers in projection-based multi-screen immersive environments

Abstract

<p>Projection-based immersive virtual environments are very powerful tools to work on engineering and scientific problems involving teams of researchers. These environments enable the development of virtual representations of a problem domain in which multiple users can simultaneously share a virtual experience, providing a unique infrastructure for team work. The current limitation for effective teamwork is that these systems support only a single viewpoint, usually corresponding to a user wearing a head tracking device. This thesis presents a hardware and software design to enable multiple simultaneous viewpoints in a multi-screen immersive environment. This system is designed to be flexible and easily scalable, preparing for future expansion to additional users when the underlying technologies allow it. The design extends the commonly used single user time-multiplexed stereo viewing model to multiple users. This research also extends existing development tools to support our multiple viewer virtual design. This work also focuses on extending existing applications to multiple viewer environments. A design and implementation of the system is presented in detail. This system enables two users viewing stereoscopic images or four users viewing monoscopic images to simultaneously view the correct images projected on the screen from their tracked viewpoint.</p>