Introduction

This is the readme file for Matt Hall's remarkable collection of CAVE Toys. The Toys are simple RTICAs (real-time interactive CAVE animations) which show what amazing things you can do with the CAVE, but in a playful, scientifically unthreatening manner. These the CAVE programming techniques become everything but toys in serious scientific applications.
GKF 27jan01

Hello-
First, the default navigation of the toys is done by using the joystick - push forward or back to move in that direction, push left or right to turn. For toys with menus, click the middle button to change the selected item (the one highlighted in the cyan box). Left and right buttons will perform actions (i.e. add/remove objects or increase/decrease gravity).
Holding down the middle button for >2 seconds will collapse the menu to a one line display at the bottom of the screen. The same controls that are used above still work, but you can only see one line at a time. To get back to the full menu, just hold the middle button for 2sec.

A brief description of all the toys here

Aqua - an attempt to simulate the pooling of water. The right button drips water off the wand, the left resets. The "floor" that the water pools on is waist high (since the floor is hard to see on IWall and even the CAVE).

Bump - networked bumper cars - so having 2 or more players makes it more fun. You can mix-n-match CAVEs,IWalls,IDesks, and even sims. The controls are finicky, but basically tilt the wand down to accelerate, tilt up to slow down (you can go in reverse if you get stuck), and point the wand left or right to turn

Cricket - Hit the balls with the bat (your wand, of course). It is kind of hard to hit balls on the floor (Flock of Birds problem, not mine!). To start and also to reset the balls, click the middle button.

Fly - A spray of multicolored sparks emanate from the wand. You can control such things as gravity,speed, number of sparks, and spread. For your convenience there are a few presets (the 1st menu item - use left and right buttons) - my favorite is 3dDraw, which turns off all gravity and initial velocity, allowing you to make 3D line drawings with the wand.

Glom - A Sticky mess. Use the wand to shoot multicolored, multisized balls. Once they hit the central white ball, they adhere, and they also become adhesive, so any other loose balls will stick to them. You can fiddle with gravity and air resistance, speed and quantity. (You must have the first menu item selected to add or remove balls). Navigation is a bit different - use the joystick to rotate yourself around the central globe.

Glom2 - Similar to Glom, but the initial sticky object is a flat wall instead of a sphere.

Whip - was originally intended to simulate... a whip. Didn't quite work - it behaves more like a streamer, which I thought was pretty, so I left it alone. No controls except for the default navigation.

vpoem - 3D Magnetic poetry for the CAVE. A list of words appears on a wall (On CAVE, left wall, in IWall, bottomleft). Point to a word (it will turn red) and hold down the left button to select it (it will turn cyan). Position it where you want, and relese the left button (you can reposition it later if you wish) Caveats - The word list is in default.words, which currently only contains the words "this, is, only, a, test" - a rather limited vocabulary even for Haiku. You can copy the executable and default.words file to your own directory and edit them there. Also, no save feature yet, so as soon as you quit vpoem, your Whitmanesque verse will be but a memory.