DiVE in at Duke

You rustle frantically through the objects on your kitchen counter, ignoring the escalating whistle of the tea kettle. Outside, a car horn blares impatiently. You look behind the toaster—even in the oven. Where are your car keys?

“I can’t believe you lost them again,” you hear over your shoulder. It’s hard to ignore the tone of disgust.

Your cat interjects with an annoying meow as you push aside a pile of cookbooks. In your haste, you accidentally knock some dishes onto the floor. In the other room, the baby starts to cry. Since when do you have a baby?

That’s when you remember that you’re in the DiVE, short for the Duke immersive Virtual Environment. It consists of a small room with images projected onto opaque fabric walls and sound coming in through large exterior speakers. Outside, a technician controls the images and sounds, and 3D glasses turn blurry images into ones you want to reach out and touch.

The DiVE was built to be used for teaching experiences and scientific visualization, as well as cognitive experiments. Its research power lies in its capacity to fully control the user experience while at the same time recording where a person is looking and standing, said Rachael Brady, director of Duke’s Visualization Technology Group.

“As humans, we understand 3D spatial relationships by moving around,” Brady said. “It helps us see patterns and understand relationships between objects.”

The DiVE is a “cave” system, meaning that it has a human-sized visual field, tracks body movements and uses stereo vision, the same technology used for 3D movies to create depth perception. A handheld controller facilitates users’ movement through the virtual world and allows them to interact with objects within it.

“Mostly what amazes me is that, the longer people are in the DiVE, the more they start reacting to objects like they’re actually there,” said Holton Thompson, an associate in research who designed the kitchen, among other applications. For example, in the Kitchen application, people move to look around the refrigerator door and move their head out of the way when opening a cabinet—even though it’s not actually there.

“We joke that we’re the best-kept secret at Duke,” Thompson said.

During one Thursday open house, Thompson guided sophomore Shannon Kalsow and freshman Torrey Lubkin through a series of applications as diverse as making their own rollercoasters, playing 3D ping-pong and feeding cake to a three-headed dog.

“It’s like Wii, but better,” Kalsow said.

Several Duke courses have utilized the DiVE. Sometimes, students create unique content for the DiVE, like when an undergraduate created a virtual replica of a French cathedral for his art history class. Other times, professors create their own applications to provide a specific experience for their students.

Scott Huettel, associate professor of psychology and neuroscience, used the DiVE to teach his students about the spatial relationships between regions of the brain. Huettel used high-resolution MRI data to create a 3D replica of the brain, which students then interacted with to identify major parts of the brain.

To use the DiVE for cognitive experiments, researchers need to know that the virtual system can evoke the same reactions from participants as more traditional methods do. Brady said this is important so that when researchers publish their work, the scientific community can trust the validity of their findings.

The kitchen experiment tests the premise that responses in a virtual reality setting correlate with responses in real life. As participants try to find the virtual car keys within nine minutes, the sights and sounds become increasingly irritating. The real kicker? The task is impossible—there are no keys.

The kitchen is supposed to make people angry. People kept putting the meowing cat into the oven, Thompson said.

“We were trying to recreate an adverse environment, and we were looking to see if people would choose to engage in the annoying environment or to distance themselves from it,” Brady said. p