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.

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Welcome to the IQ-Station Wiki for commodity-based low-cost VR


This site is a place where the community of users of midrange-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. But that was during the era of COTS 3D-TVs, and before COTS HMDs.

Now however, the era of 3D-TVs has waned, but by replacing them with not-terribly-expensive short-throw projectors, and by using super-low-cost tracking from consumer HMD technology, we can still build larger fishtank-style VR displays (IQ-stations) for something reasonable — ~$7,000.

The software discussed here (VR libraries and applications) is often useful for both consumer HMDs, and these midrange-cost IQ-stations, as well as full-sized CAVE VR systems, and thus can be useful for VR pracitioners of the full range of system types and costs. (Though primarily oriented to those interested in immersive visualization — scientific visualization in VR.)

VR Integration Software

Most IQ-station systems that our community works with run VR applications built on one of two VR integration libraries (the first two in this list). However, there are other good options available, which are included here for further exploration:

VR Applications

Commercial Applications

  • syGlass — volume viewer for SteamVR on MS-Windows

VR Tools

  • VRPN — Virtual Reality Peripheral Network tool for aggregating data from input devices
  • ViveLighthouse — Accessing Vive Lighthouse tracking on Linux
    • LibSurvive — Building the LibSurvive library for Lighthouse tracking on Linux
  • Monado — Open-source OpenXR runtime for Linux (and Android)
  • OpenXR — Building OpenXR API on Linux

Visuallization Applications

Other Applications

  • Bino — stereoscopic movie player
  • XVS — John Stone's stereoscopic image viewer

Rendering Libraries

  • Barney — Cross-GPU Multi-threaded rendering library
  • Visionaray — Open-source C++ Ray-Tracing template library

NIST Trans-Portable-VR

Hardware (old)

The basic components of an IQ-station are:

Community

For the past decade (apart from one "COVID year"), there has been a SIGGRAPH BOF with the topic of Immersive Visualization:

Part of our community building efforts include bootcamps on Immersive Visualization. Thus far, we have hosted three successful events:

Related Publications


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