The design and development of the destiny‐class cybercanoe hybrid reality environment

Abstract

The Destiny‐class CyberCANOE (Destiny) is a Hybrid Reality environment that provides 20/20 visual acuity in a 13‐foot‐wide, 320‐degree cylindrical structure comprised of tiled passive stereo‐capable organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays. Hybrid Reality systems combine sur-round‐screen virtual reality environments with ultra‐high‐resolution digital project‐rooms. They are intended as collaborative environments that enable multiple users to work minimally encum-bered for long periods of time in rooms surrounded by data in the form of visualizations that benefit from being displayed at resolutions matching visual acuity and/or in stereoscopic 3D. Destiny is unique in that it is the first Hybrid Reality system to use OLED displays and it uses a real‐time GPU-based approach for minimizing stereoscopic crosstalk. This paper chronicles the non‐trivial engineering research and attention‐to‐detail that is required to develop a production quality hybrid-reality environment by providing details about Destiny’s design and construction process. This detailed account of how a Hybrid Reality system is designed and constructed from the ground up will help VR researchers and developers understand the engineering complexity of developing such systems. This paper also discusses a GPU‐based crosstalk mitigation technique and evaluation, and the use of Microsoft’s augmented reality headset, the HoloLens, as a design and training aid during construction.