Immersive Visualization / IQ-Station Wiki
This site hosts information on virtual reality systems that are geared toward scientific visualization, and as such often toward VR on Linux-based systems. Thus, pages here cover various software (and sometimes hardware) technologies that enable virtual reality operation on Linux.
The original IQ-station effort was to create low-cost (for the time) VR systems making use of 3DTV displays to produce CAVE/Fishtank-style VR displays. That effort pre-dated the rise of the consumer HMD VR systems, however, the realm of midrange-cost large-fishtank systems is still important, and has transitioned from 3DTV-based systems to short-throw projectors.
Main Page
Welcome to the IQ-Station Wiki for commodity-based low-cost VR
This site is a place where the community of users of lower-cost
virtual reality displays can congregate and share information.
In the past our focus was on systems primarily constructed from
Commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components for a quality VR experience
around the $10,000 to $15,000 price range. Unfortunately, the era
of COTS 3D-TVs has waned, and so this method (IQ-stations) is no longer practical.
However, the information about the applications is still pertinent, including instructions on how to use the Vrui system to operate HTC Vive displays on Linux systems.
Hardware
The basic components of an IQ-station are:
Community
Part of our community building efforts include bootcamps on Immersive Visualization. Thus far, we have hosted three successful events:
- Bootcamp in Indianapolis held March 25-27, 2013
- Bootcamp in Laramie held June 12-14, 2013
- Bootcamp in Little Rock held October 22-24, 2014
- Bootcamp in Idaho Falls held October 20-21, 2016
In addition to documenting the bootcamps here, we also gave a presentation at SuperComputing 2013:
Integration Software
Most IQ-station systems presently in operation run VR applications built on one of two VR integration libraries:
VR Applications
- Toirt Samhlaigh
- LidarViewer
- CQ3A
- Immersive ParaView
- VMD (Visual Molecular Dynamics)
- ML2VR (Matlab to VR)
VR Tools
- VRPN
- ViveLighthouse
- Monado (Open-source OpenXR runtime for Linux)
- OpenXR (Building OpenXR on Linux)
Visuallization Applications
Other Applications
- Bino stereoscopic movie player
- XVS (John Stone's stereoscopic image viewer)
Related Publications
- [Sherman 2010] IQ-Station: A Low Cost Portable Immersive Environment
- [Sherman 2013] Immersive Visualization Bootcamps: sharing expertise, building community