The NICVE was a major academic VR research centre in the late 90’s and and 2000’s. It followed on from the pioneering work by Bob Stone, Andy Connell, in the National Advanced Robotics Research Centre (NARRC) at The University Of Salford.
This was from our first paper, published by another of our lecturers; Ruth Aylett, which we did as the project at the end of the masters programme. Every single triangle in that was hand drawn separately, one at a time, by me. Modelling wasn’t really a proper thing back then. It was CAD, or Medit on an SGI O2. You can see the resemblance to N64 games of the era which were all the same hardware/software pipelines. https://www.aaai.org/Papers/Symposia/Fall/1999/FS-99-01/FS99-01-014.pdf
The NICVE 4 sided system, which was powered by a three rack SGI Onyx2 IR2 “supercomputer”. It was made of wood because the tracking systems was electromagnetic (flock of birds). When trains went past everything wobbled a bit. I used to sit in the dark reconverging the CRT guns every week with music blaring. It was a good task. It was I think the first such system outside of the USA, where it was pioneered.
One of the SGI cabs being delivered. Must be 1997 then? They were brand new. That was expensive. Really really expensive. We ran the whole building off them.
This was our reality room, with 3 edge blended Barco projectors. They were RGB CRT guns. Pre digital. Wow. This is a mockup because there wasn’t enough light for cameras of the time to capture the glory. That’s a laser scan of a 747 by Mensi, who sold us a laser scanner for a couple of hundred thousand pounds that took a couple of samples a second.
This was the Trimension Relocatable Reality Centre, at GMEX in Manchester in this case, and a very young me. The compute on the left is an SGI Onyx2 Deskside.
