(Image: Mark A. Philbrick)

Feel like experiencing an earthquake? The VuePod can take you there. It is a curved wall of 12 large, high-definition, 3D televisions, and the visuals it displays can be navigated with a Wii controller.

The immersive system, designed by Dan Ames at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and a team of students, was created to allow environmental engineers to make virtual site visits. It uses 3D lidar data, captured at sites of interest during extreme weather events, to let researchers experience the effect of natural disasters.

In addition to spectacular views, the VuePod boasts a low construction cost: just $30,000, thanks to off-the-shelf components and open-source software. That compares with $10 million to buy a similar commercially available system.


If you fancy building a VuePod of your own, all the details are given in the Journal of Computing in Civil Engineering.

“We want whoever reads this paper to be able to build a better system than we built,” says Ames.