Matt O'Connor
“We love science fiction, and we just want to live in the science fiction world,” said computer scientist Jason Leigh.

And inside the Electronic Visualization Lab’s CAVE2, anyone can enter a virtual world.

The EVL’s virtual reality environment in the College of Engineering lets people navigate through the human brain or roam through the holodeck of the Star Trek Enterprise with the help of 3D glasses.

This imposing virtual world stands 8 feet tall and 24 feet in diameter. The environment wraps 320 degrees around the user, offering a dream-like sense of infinite space that is never physically there. The system rivals 20/20 vision, consisting of 72 near-seamless passive stereo off-axis optimized 3D LCD panels that display information at 37 megapixels in 3D, or 74 megapixels in 2D.

Students and employees toured the space at an open house Feb. 20. More open houses are set from 3 to 6 p.m. April 3 and 24 in the Engineering Research Facility. Space is limited; register online.

Read the entire UIC News article.