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.)

Integration Software

Most IQ-station systems presently in operation run VR applications built on one of two VR integration libraries:

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
  • OpenXR — Building OpenXR 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