The virtual-reality StarCAVE at the University of California, San Diego allows groups of scientists to explore worlds as small as nanoparticles and as big as the cosmos, permitting new insights that could fuel discoveries in many fields.

Constructed by the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), the room operates at a combined resolution of over 68 million pixels distributed over 15 rear-projected walls and two floor screens. Each side of the pentagon-shaped room has three stacked screens, with the bottom and top screens titled inward by 15 degrees to increase the feeling of immersion.

Thirty-four high-definition projectors (two per screen) create very bright left and right eye visuals (stereo or 3D) per screen. Each pair of projectors is powered by a high-end, quad-core PC with dual graphics processing units and dual network cards to achieve gigabit Ethernet or 10GigE networking.

Users of the StarCAVE can interact with the visuals on the 360-degree display by pointing a “wand” that makes it easy to fly through the 3D images and zoom in or out.

Eventually the engineers hope to increase the visual acuity from 20/40 to 20/20, by upgrading the system’s 34 projectors from 2K to 4K (roughly 4,000 horizontal pixels for each of the 17 screens).