The Lousal Live Science Centre is part of the Portuguese Live Science Centres Network, an initiative of the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education to promote interactive science and technology education and the dissemination of science and technology in Portugal.

The virtualisation infrastructure at Lousal, known as a CAVE-Hollowspace, is one of the first in Europe to emerge from Portuguese and Brazilian academic research based in Windows platforms and Barco projection systems, and is oriented to science-based entertainment, science research and R&D services for industry. The system is owned by Fundação Frederic Velge, a joint venture between SAPEC, the Belgium company that owns the Lousal Mine, which was in operation until the late 1980s, and the Grandola City Hall in Portugal.

The Lousal initiative is a joint collaboration between several organisations: in Portugal, Fundação Frederic Velge, the Ministry of Science, Technology and Higher Education, and several public universities (ISCTE, Technical University of Lisbon, Classical University of Lisbon); and in Brazil, Petrobrás and PUCRio de Janeiro, a public university.

The physical configuration of the Lousal CAVE-Hollowspace includes six projection planes in a U-shaped layout: it has two projection planes in front (5.6 m x 2.7 m of projection surface), two on the floor (with the same dimensions), and one on each side (3.4 m x 2.7 m). The system is supported by a high-end graphics computing cluster running Microsoft Windows, which is able to generate a consolidated synthetic image of 8.3 million pixels in real time and in stereo and is able to manage 3D scenes with millions of triangles. There are seven sound-speakers facing the audience and a subwoofer under the floor. For public exhibitions, a storyteller navigates in the Virtual Environment for audiences of up to 14 people.

Fernando Fantasia, the CEO of Fundação Frederic Velge, explains that “The Centre's first purpose is to show a cinematic story about the miner and his work. The story is called ‘Virtual Visit to the Mine'. Other applications are also planned: the project will offer the unique possibility for schools, universities and research laboratories to test and visualise their academic and research projects. The Portuguese high-tech industry may also benefit from using this infrastructure for digital visualisation and testing of research in areas such as plastics moulding, industrial product design, oil exploration and mining, and engineering.”

The Lousal pyrite Mine today (Alentejo, Portugal)

Luciano Pereira Soares, Phd in Computer Graphics, a Brazilian pioneer in the development of these types of facilities in South America, and now at Petrobrás and PUC-Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, thinks that “immersive virtual reality facilities enable people to go to places where it is not possible to be otherwise. Educators can travel to any age, studying how humanity was and will be. Engineers, designers and marketers can analyse their industrial products before they are produced. Miners can enter an oil reservoir and decide the best place to dig. The CAVE-Hollowspace at Lousal will offer the most modern technology in virtual reality to fully immerse users in any virtual environment. This solution, a best practice case in the adoption of Windows platforms for this type of high-end computing infrastructure, has accurate image synthesis, high quality sound and precise user tracking, key elements to virtual reality simulations. I believe that in a short time, many users in Portugal and all over the world will take advantage of this facility for their projects.”

According to Rafael Bastos, ADETTI researcher and PhD student at ISCTE, Portugal, “The adoption of the Microsoft platform and development tools for the base system support has facilitated our in-house core developments for the CAVE-Hollowspace, namely the infraredbased user tracking sub-system, the software to manage both the 3D graphics and 3D sound information over the network, the multimodal user computer interaction sub-system, our real-time image synthesis algorithms and our Virtual Reality content authoring sub-system. Our system will be easily disseminated in Portuguese and Brazilian academic research. Speech recognition is another effective interaction mechanism for immersive systems. Discrete interactions such as pausing and restarting the simulation or choosing interaction device can be easily be accomplished by a voice command. For this purpose, our project has adopted the Microsoft language pack in Portuguese, developed by MLDC, which greatly improves natural multimodal interaction.”

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