Run CavePainting from the kiosk

This pages describes the design of the Cave system and tells you how to start and clean up Cavepainting sessions at Granoff in Studio 4.

The Cave System

This system consists an 8x8x8 cube environment with the following elements.

Computers

The computer directly adjacent to the cube is a touch-sensitive Windows 8 machine known as "the kiosk". This is the only computer you'll need to use to access the Cave--all others are for supporting systems. The main interface for the Cave is a web browser that consists of a set of tabbed panels and buttons. Each tab contains a set of programs to run in the Cave. The "Video Config" and "Cavepainting" tabs are the only ones we'll use--the others are available for other courses that use the system.

Wands

There are two wands for authoring content and interacting with your scene. The black wand is for use in your dominant hand and a white wand for your other hand. These are both hard to replace, so please be careful not to drop or otherwise damage them. Only the bottom trigger button on each wand is used in Cavepainting. The black wand has a power button on the right side of the top panel, which should light up when pressed. The white wand has a switch on bottom of the back panel, which should also light up when turned on. The black wand will power down automatically; however, the white wand should be turned off manually (to avoid making an enemy of the next person in the Cave :)

Glasses

The stereoscopic glasses allow the rendered scene to be selectively shown to each eye and synchronize with the refresh rate of the projectors. One special pair of glasses has a fixture of sticks and ball, which is used for tracking the position of the users head. Other glasses will work, but there may be strange effects in the viewed scene from perspective distortions. The closer others are to the head-tracked glasses, the more accurate the view will be. Each pair of glasses has a button for turning it on that is located on near the right temple. The button is pressure sensitive and requires squeezing hard.

Starting and Stopping Cavepainting

Start the program

• Navigate the kiosk to the browser interface
• Tap the "Video Config" tab
• Tap the "Cave On" button
• Tap the "Cavepainting" tab
• Tap the button associated with your user account
• Swipe the screen left to right to get to the desktop. Be sure to start the swipe from the outside of the screen
• Tap the virtual keyboard icon
• Tap the VRG3D window to give it focus

Prepare the hardware

• Orient the tracking glasses so they are looking at front wall of the Cave
• Squeeze (hard) the right temple of the frame until the lenses turn grayish in color
• Check that they are tracking and synchronized by walking around the Cave
• Turn on the black wand
• Turn on the white wand
• Turn off the room lights (to the right of the exit)
• Enjoy!

Stopping Cavepainting

• Save your amazing work (you should already be doing this to back things up!)
• Turn off the white wand (the black will go off automatically)
• Turn off the glasses by squeezing the right temple until the lenses turn greenish
• Tap the skull and crossbones icon in the kiosk browser
• Tap the "Video Config" tab
• Tab the "Cave off" button

If you have any trouble, check out Troubleshoot CavePainting for what to try next.