I Became A Caveman

In January 2010 I entered my research lab and was immediately shown the hardware I was supposed to work with. It is CAVE (Computer Automated Virtual Environment). It is popularly known as Cave Automated Virtual Environment, but Dr. Leu, my adviser always insisted to call it Computer Automated. Well, I gave up after two attempts. For anyone who wants to work as Research Assistant and your adviser is very adamant and you don’t have any other choice, he/she has to accept what adviser says. Because, after all he’s paying you and you are also educationally benefiting from it.

Anyways whatever we call it, I am convinced that this CAVE took me many steps ahead from where I started. Certainly I am grateful to Dr. Leu despite my frictions with him. Like I mentioned my previous blog, I did not even know what is the meaning of Virtual reality. I only knew Maya (Illusions, as described in Hindu scriptures) by that time. I thought it will be something similar to it. When I saw the CAVE demonstration I was convinced that the Maya as I knew it, is very similar to what I was seeing. I will be very honest to say that, I felt proud of being Indian, because my ancestors knew about these things well before anybody knew. (This ‘Indian-ness’ always  remained in back of my mind for whole period I lived in USA)

The CAVE has four screens, front, left, right and bottom. All the screens were lit from back by projectors with RGB lights spectrum. Each screen had one computer connected to it. Obviously at first I was slightly frightened to see all the hardware. Wenjuan Jhu (a post doc student of Dr. Leu at the time) gave the demo on the CAVE. This was the time I met another adviser Dr. Corns from Engineering Management dept. Although he was not directly related to Mechanical department, because of his keen interest in Virtual Reality made him an interested party in VR lab. It will not wrong if I could say, the CAVE stood up and worked because of Dr. Corns. Rest of the students and Dr. Leu himself, was not good at software development. Dr. Corns brought various software and toolkits and his knowledge he gained while he was in Iowa State University, on the floor to build CAVE.

On that day after watching the demo, Dr. Leu stated my work in just one sentence, “You will do your research on this”. I said okay (did I have choice really !?) Here I must tell the readers, even though I had to take whatever I could get as research, but, my research subject helped me a lot. I will always remain grateful for that. I will explain this in later chapters. I saw that Dr. Leu looked happy and so did Dr. Jhu. I could see my other senior lab mates Anoop Vader and Akul Joshi were also pleased. I came to know later on that, they were happy because finally Dr. Leu got someone to work on CAVE.

Finally there was a CAVEMan in the lab!