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Life inside the Cave

Posted on 9 Apr 2008 at 16:15

But it isn't without its mishaps. "One of the problems we had with [the yacht] was that people wanted to see the view from the balconies, but another thing we'd put in it was a piece of code that would keep people's feet on the ground.

"It does that by knowing where your head is in the virtual environment and then it draws a vector down and finds the nearest geometry and places your feet there. But people would go to the balcony, lean out and look down, and it would draw the vector five floors down so we'd have people throwing themselves off. A sudden drop like that can make you feel really unwell."

Steed couldn't be prouder of the boat if he actually owned it. We ask who does, but he won't say. We pester him and eventually he admits that the person decided not to buy it. It's one of the dangers of allowing a buyer to see what they're getting instead of just leaving it to the imagination, but Steed is convinced these virtual showrooms are the future.

"We've started having conversations about showrooms with virtual cars in," he reveals. "There are so many models these days that you can't have a showroom with them all in.

"Mercedes already does it in Germany with its high-end, bespoke Maybachs. It only makes 100 a year so it can't have showrooms, but has 3D models instead."

Driving ambition

The CAVE doesn't only help showroom staff wow potential buyers - it also helps engineers design the cars in the first place. In December 2007, Ford installed a CAVE at its product development centre in Michigan, giving engineers the opportunity to simulate ideas without having to build expensive models. Nowadays, if a designer wants to know if the headrest obscures the view out of the rear window of the latest Focus, they just head to the CAVE, sit in a 3D version of the car and look. While the same test can be done with a model, Ford claims it can build a virtual-reality car within a few days of finishing a CAD drawing, as opposed to the 12 weeks it takes to build a physical prototype. The company estimates that the technology is trimming "thousands of dollars and several months from the product development process".

Fellow manufacturer Land Rover is also a CAVE convert, and is installing a £2 million facility at its Gaydon engineering centre in Warwickshire. Land Rover says its CAVE will be the most advanced in the world, and the company's principal engineer, Brian Waterfield, believes it's money well spent. "The CAVE allows us to work smarter and faster, and gives us the ability to analyse lots of different designs at once rather than having to narrow things down because we have to build physical models. It will hopefully allow us to produce things more quickly, but even if it doesn't we'll still be building better vehicles."

Ultimately, Waterfield envisions the CAVE as not only a design tool, but also a testing and engineering resource."We've designed it so we can get a new Discovery in there and display running roads on the screens. We have software that will simulate movement and engine rock."

Land Rover expects the facility to be completed in spring, which begs the question: why has it taken the industry so long to take advantage of a technology that's been around for ten years? "We've always wished we could do it all virtually, but the computer power and the projectors have never been there," explains Waterfield. "It's only now that computers are up to it."

Cost is also a factor. When UCL installed its first CAVE in 2000 it cost £888,000 - half of that going on the machine used to generate the graphics. Nowadays, its CAVE is controlled by a cluster of five PCs equipped with Nvidia Quadro FX 5600s, genlocked together so they produce images at the same microsecond. Even given the £1,500 per card mark-up for the genlock capability, the same system would now cost only tens of thousands.