Mechdyne initially installed the first CAVE™ at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) in 1998. Located at NIOSH's Morgantown, West Virginia, location, the CAVE is used to test techniques to help construction workers minimize falling from heights.
When the NIOSH CAVE environment was first installed, the system was comprised of three rear-projected walls and a front-projected floor using analog CRT projectors. A supercomputer was required to generate active stereo 3D images through the projectors. When viewed with LCD shutter glasses, the CAVE becomes a fully immersive 3D environment. The CAVE also used an electro-magnetic motion tracking system which monitored the subject's position and orientation in real time. The images on the walls and floor change in real time to match the subject's movements.
The CAVE environment proved so reliable and useful to the work being conducted at NIOSH that the system was used for more than a decade before being upgraded by Mechdyne. The upgrade included all new wall and floor screens, new brighter and higher resolution digital DLP active stereo projectors, more sensitive inertial- acoustic tracking and a Windows based PC cluster with professional graphic cards.