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.
CQ3A
CAVE Quake III Arena (CQ3A)
CAVE Quake III Arena is an immersive model viewer for Quake-III world models. It can be used to load many .pk3 worlds and travel through them in a CAVE or other immersive display.
NOTE: as it has been tested only on a handful of Quake-III models, there are features that are missing, causing some worlds to not work, or have missing elements.
CQ3A was developed by Paul Rajlich during his time at NCSA.
How to Run CQ3A
By default, CQ3A will use the standard demo world in pak0.pk3 (which should be in the local directory). So to run:
% ./cq3a
However, an alternate world can be specified, along with other options:
% ./cq3a [--notitle] [--noitems] [--spots <location file>.txt] [<map>.bsp [<world>.pk3]]
How to Build CQ3A (for FreeVR)
CQ3A compiles very easily (and quickly) with FreeVR — and hence it works well as an application for quickly testing a new immersive system. There are no dependencies, other than OpenGL and FreeVR.
- Download the latest source (or nearly latest):
- http://www.visbox.com/cq3a/download.html
- NOTE: the latest version on that page is 0.9.1, but there is a version 0.9.2 floating around, and Bill Sherman has made additional enhancements. The good news is that 0.9.1 works pretty well.
- Untar the source ball
- E.g.
% tar -zxf cq3a-0.9.1-src.tar.gz
- E.g.
- Select FreeVR in the Makefile
% $EDITOR Makefile- Uncomment the three lines associated with FreeVR and set the location for the FreeVR library and header files:
MAINOBJ = uifvr.oMAININC = -I<location of FreeVR headers>MAINLIB = -L<location of FreeVR library> -lfreevr_64
- Make sure all other interface options are commented out
- Uncomment the three lines associated with FreeVR and set the location for the FreeVR library and header files:
- Compile
% make -j 8- (this will take less than a minute)
If you have a world file, you are now ready to run.
How to Configure CQ3A
There is very little required to configure CQ3A — other than the standard configuration for FreeVR.
The choices available are primarily what world to download, and perhaps what jump locations you will include to let travelers jump to interesting locations. The format is very simple — it consists of a line for each jump location with the following information:
x-coordinate y-coordinate z-coordinate azimuth-angle elevation-angle walk-mode-flag