The Caves of Lascaux…or simply LASCAUX…was not so much a WTK demo as it was a prominent art exhibit developed, in part, with the Sense8 libraries. It was the brain child of Benjamin Britton, then an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati.
Visual artist Benjamin Britton took a lot of flack from the French culturati when he proposed creating a virtual-reality exhibition based on the prehistoric Lascaux caves of France. “They thought that I would put Mickey Mouse ears on the bison,” recalls Britton.
Wired, Feb 24, 1997
Ben describes the development experience on his own website.
While Ben’s work was already sort of legendary during my time at Sense8, my hands on introduction was during Siggraph ’97 when Sense8 planned to exhibit a CAVE VR system at the show, featuring content from LASCAUX as well are recent data from the Mars rover mission. (Honestly, at the time, I was much more excited about the Mars data, but came to greatly appreciate the Lascaux work.)
Press Release: SENSE8 TO HOST 3D/VR WALK-THROUGH OF MARTIAN LANDSCAPE Mill Valley, CA -- SENSE8 Corporation will host an immersive 3D/Virtual Reality (3D/VR) walk-through of the Martian landscape and the caves at Lascaux in the SENSE8 booth at SIGGRAPH 97. Participants will take part in a fully immersive stereoscopic experience on the surface of the Red Planet from within a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), engineered by Pyramid Systems. Guests will also have the opportunity to explore a 3D/VR simulation of the world-renowned caves and ancient wall paintings at Lascaux, France. Pyramid's CAVE is a 10'xlO x10' structure consisting of four rear-projected screen walls and a front-projected floor displaying a simulated Martian environment or prehistoric art gallery. The simulation will be controlled by an application built on top of SENSE8 WorldToolKit(WTK) and will run on a Silicon Graphics Onyx supercomputer. With a pair of LCD stereoscopic glasses from Stereographics Corporation, participants will be treated to a truly other worldly experience. The movements of the virtual explorers will be tracked by electronic sensors which allow the CAVE to continuously update its displays.
The CAVE (Cave Automated Virtual Environment) system is itself an impressive setup. It was a 10’x10′ room with rear projected screens on each wall and a top-down projector depicting the floor.
Multiple people could participate in the simulation simultaneously and only needed to wear lightweight LCD shutter glasses to experience the 3D effect.
This YouTube video captures Ben’s experience. While somewhat crude by today’s standards (my son notes is has a major Gorilla Tag vibe), the effect was astounding at the time. It helped me start to understand the value of content beyond the technology.
As Siggraph, we would have groups of people enter the darkened CAVE to experience either the Mars landscape or LASCUAX (perhaps we offered both). The participants would stand in place looking around while the tour guide (myself included) would slowly move the world around them. To this day, I distinctively recall the odd sensation of claustrophobia as the wall of LASCAUX became closer and closer although we remained in the same 10’x10′ space.
Ben documented some of his thoughts in the Siggraph proceedings.
It appears Ben clearly taught the culturati a thing or two. Since his LASCAUX experience, it appears there have been at least two more attempts to recrate the cave in VR as well as a “virtual tour” of the cave on its official website.
- 2012 Version
- 2021 version by Desault Systems
While I can not find a full Oculus Quest compatible experience, Geoffrey Marchal has shared a model of a portion of the cave on Sketchfab.
And it does appear Google has worked to recreate other ancient cave art such as Chauvet.
UPDATE:
I found these picture of Siggraph97 where we set up the CAVE system: