X-SITE CAVE: Evolution of High-Resolution Immersive Display Towards a Cost-Efficient and Open-Source Design

The X-SITE CAVE at Freiberg University is an immersive VR platform for interactive scientific visualization. Main features include its tiled-display design yielding a very high visual resolution and its small spatial footprint. Since its initial setup in 2008, the system has been under continuous development and modernization. An important aspect is the evolution from a rather expensive and partially proprietary platform to a cost-efficient and open-source driven system. High- and medium cost components like commercial calibration software and the initial set of projectors were gradually replaced by open-source software, in-house developments and off-the-shelf hardware. An overview of the history and the massive changes over time is provided with special focus on more recent developments including hardware upgrades, calibration improvements and integration of modern rendering software. A novelty, to the best of our knowledge, is the integration of the open-source game engine Godot into a CAVE.