2023 | Garching (DE)Second Generation, First of Its Kind
At the Centre for Virtual Reality and Visualisation (V2C) of the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences in Garching, researchers have been stepping inside their own data for more than a decade — from simulations of processes deep within the Earth’s mantle and visualisations of blood flow through the human body to digital reconstructions of historical buildings. At its heart is the CAVE, a walk-in cube with imaging on five sides, where entire research teams can move through a simulation together and discuss what they see on the spot. The original, projection-based installation was also built by Kraftwerk Living Technologies — and when it came to replacing it with a fully LED-based CAVE, the LRZ chose KLT again.
The new installation replaces rear projection, projectors and mirror paths with 1,620 borderless LED panels in 225 cabinets, connected by roughly 3.25 km of cabling. Each of the five surfaces resolves at 2,400 × 2,430 pixels with a 1.25 mm pixel pitch — a substantial increase over the 1,920 × 1,920 pixels of the previous system — and displays stereoscopically at 120 frames per second, 60 frames per eye. A latest-generation optical tracking system with four ceiling-mounted cameras updates the perspective without perceptible delay, while a seven-node cluster, five of them dedicated to image generation, drives the content. With the structural space for projectors and mirrors no longer required, the image surfaces could grow by 30 centimetres within the same room. A second advantage emerges in daily operation: no lamp replacements, no realignment of projection geometries — individual LED modules can be swapped out in moments.
Kraftwerk Living Technologies was responsible for the installation. The result is a research infrastructure that, in the LRZ’s own assessment, ranks among the first fully LED-based CAVEs ever built — and that delivers, above all, one thing in everyday use: a homogeneous, judder-free image that holds together when viewers turn, step closer or zoom into detail. Where immersion used to break down on the technology, the view is now clear for the science.
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