The Design and Development of the Destiny-Class CyberCANOE Hybrid Reality Environment

The Destiny-class CyberCANOE (Destiny) is a Hybrid Reality environment that provides 20/20 visual acuity in a 13-foot-wide, 320-degree cylindrical structure comprised of tiled passive stereo-capable organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays. Hybrid Reality systems combine surround-screen virtual reality environments with ultra-high-resolution digital project-rooms. They are intended as collaborative environments that enable multiple users to work minimally encumbered for long periods of time in rooms surrounded by data in the form of visualizations that benefit from being displayed at resolutions matching visual acuity and/or in stereoscopic 3D. Destiny is unique in that it is the first Hybrid Reality system to use OLED displays and it uses a real-time GPU-based approach for minimizing stereoscopic crosstalk. This paper chronicles the non-trivial engineering research and attention-to-detail that is required to develop a production quality hybrid-reality environment by providing details about Destiny’s design and construction process. This detailed account of how a Hybrid Reality system is designed and constructed from the ground up will help VR researchers and developers understand the engineering complexity of developing such systems. This paper also discusses a GPU-based crosstalk mitigation technique and evaluation, and the use of Microsoft’s augmented reality headset, the HoloLens, as a design and training aid during construction.