‘CAVE’ system
Inspired by Marcello Gómez-Maureira's lecture
In the lecture by Marcello Gómez-Maureira, he showed us a project he worked on for his Bachelor thesis. This project was to create a virtual supermarket using a ‘CAVE’ setup. They did this for Albert Heijn. When I was looking online for this project, I couldn’t find any information about it. That’s why for this article I will take a look at CAVE systems used for supermarkets in general, inspired by Marcello Gómez-Maureira’s project. I found this project: http://www.funkydesignspaces.com/virtualsupermarket/ which shows a lot of similarities with the project Marcello described in his lecture.
The goal of the installation was to find out where people look while walking through a supermarket, but it can also be used to test in store setups or communication.
CAVE stands for: ‘Cave Automatic Virtual Environment’ and it is a box with 3 to 4 walls surrounding the subject. On these walls, images are projected from the other side of the wall, so that the projectors are on the outside of the box. Also the floor is getting a projection so that the subject is fully emerged in a virtual environment without the need of wearing a VR-headset. I’ve also seen setups where the projected walls are replaced with big screens, but this might be more expensive. Some systems even use 3D sounds to make it feel even more realistic. The subject is also being tracked using a tracking system, so that researchers can see where the subject is looking at and to move the images on the walls and floor according to the movement of the subject. For the tracking part, different kinds of systems can be used, like IR tracking or computer vision tracking.
The fact that this system uses plenty of different technologies and it requires a human to interact with it, it fits perfectly in the field of Human Computer Interactions. It literally is another way than VR-headsets to connect humans to a virtual world.
Personally I was intrigued by this technology because I see it’s potential and I love the technology. The fact that you can put humans in a virtual environment without the need for them to wear a VR-headset is absolutely freeing and more intuitive for us. Besides that, I see a lot of potential for this tech, from education, where we can put astronomy students on the moon or paleontology students on an island with dinosaurs, to supermarkets and brands being able to efficiently gather data on their in store communication and testing out new in store displays; the possibilities are endless. The only drawback to this setup compared to using a VR-headset would be the costs of setting it up and the space needed to set it up.
