AZ-LIVE Facilities

AZ-LIVE is run by the Research Computing Support group within University Information Technology Services (UITS). The lab is just one of the resources provided by the Scientific Visualization Lab staff in Research Computing Support. AZ-LIVE is located in room 307 of the Computer Center building at Speedway and Highland.

We chose the Fakespace Systems Flex™ re-configurable environment as the visualization solution for AZ-LIVE. Their system design allows a single person to configure the walls of the environment into three different configurations, each providing a different type of viewing experience.

This image sequence depicts the environment as the side modules are rotated from the "CAVE configuration" (leftmost image), through the "Theatre configuration" (middle image), into the "Flat wall configuration" (rightmost image).
Click on any of the images to see the entire mpeg animation of the reconfiguration sequence.

Fakespace was also contracted to provide the DLP projectors, tracking system, stereographic eyewear and audio system. The Silicon Graphics Onyx4 UltimateVision workstation was originally chosen to power our immersive environment since the Scientific Visualization Lab already had a system with half the processors and graphics pipes necessary to drive the Flex system. However, we have since moved to a 4 node, 64-bit Linux cluster with NVidia graphics cards, with which we are very pleased. Exact details about the hardware in each node of the cluster are shown in the section below.

Equipment in the Environment

• Three 8 feet tall by 10 feet wide vertical projection walls
• One 8 feet by 10 feet projection floor
• Four Christie Digital Mirage 2000 DLP projectors, displaying 1280 x 1024 @ 96Hz resolution
• Fifteen pairs of Stereographics Crystal Eyes III LCD eyewear
• Three extra long-range IR stereo sync emitters
• InterSense IS-900 acoustic motion tracking system
• MiniTrax wireless wand and head tracking devices
• Crown CTS-4200 four-channel, 200 watt-per-channel amplifier
• Four JBL Control 28 loudspeakers
• Four HP xw9300 Workstations Linux cluster:
• Dual AMD Opteron 250/2.4GHz processors
• Four gigabytes DDR-400 memory
• NVIDIA Quadro FX4500 graphics board (PCI-E, 512MB)
• NVIDIA Quadro G-Sync card



Immersed in the CAVE configuration