Goals | Facility | Technology | Content

The SkyVision system was built and intended for content that is rendered off-line and then played back from disk. In order to create an interactive show, the team had to assemble a system that could dynamically generate content in real time.

Using the Alice Rapid Prototyping Environment as a software platform, the team took a commodity 833 MHz Pentium III desktop computer and installed five 3dfx Voodoo 3 graphics cards. This hardware/software pairing was able to simultaneously render to all five of the Earth Theateršs screens.

As a primary means of input, the group used a computer vision system, also developed at Carnegie Mellon, that allows audience members to lean left and right in their seats in order to exert shared control over the environment projected on the screens, in this case flying a time machine through a prehistoric river canyon.