CrowdCave: Stereo Crowds in a VR Cave

The Performance

CrowdCave was an immersive art performance created for the IDEAS 2015 event at UC San Diego. IDEAS (Interdisciplinary Digital and Electronic Arts) brings together artists, engineers, and researchers to create work at the intersection of art and technology. Our piece took the concept of digital crowds — developed through our earlier VideoMob work — and placed them inside a VR CAVE environment, creating a fully immersive experience where audiences were surrounded by stereo projections of composite digital crowds.

The CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment) at UC San Diego is a room-sized VR system where images are projected on multiple walls, floor, and ceiling. Inside the CAVE, the boundaries between the physical room and the digital crowd dissolve — participants feel as though they are standing within a crowd of virtual figures, all assembled from real video recordings of individual people.

From VideoMob to CrowdCave

CrowdCave evolved from the VideoMob project, taking the same core idea of connecting strangers through digital crowd compositions and scaling it into an immersive spatial experience. Where VideoMob was a screen-based installation, CrowdCave surrounded the viewer completely, adding stereoscopic depth and the sense of physical presence among the digital crowd.

Gallery

My Contribution

I developed the real-time rendering pipeline that composited individual video recordings into stereoscopic crowd scenes for the CAVE environment. This required adapting the video processing techniques from VideoMob to work with the CAVE's multi-wall stereo projection system. I also helped design the audience experience and the interaction flow during the IDEAS performance.

Team

Danilo Gasques, Ph.D., Emily Grenader, Sylvia Li, Jimmy Nguyen, Nadir Weibel, Ph.D.

Acknowledgments

This work was presented as part of the IDEAS performance series at UC San Diego, supported by the Qualcomm Institute and the UCSD Library's digital media resources.