This new technology can change the way doctors are trained and improve patient care, Leigh said. The technology can prove vital for Pharmaceutical researchers, Car designers, Weather researchers, Architects and others, where they can simulate the data in the virtual for their projects.

Brain surgeon Ali Alaraj who first took a virtual ride through CAVE 2 said "You can walk between the blood vessels," said the University of Illinois College of Medicine neurosurgeon. "You can look at the arteries from below. You can look at the arteries from the side. That was science fiction for me."

The original technology, introduced in the early 1990s, was called CAVE, which stood for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment and also cleverly referred to Plato's cave, the philosopher's analogy about shadows and reality. It was named by former lab co-directors Tom DeFanti and Dan Sandin.

The second generation of the CAVE, invented by Leigh and his collaborator Andy Johnson, has higher resolution. The project was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy.

"It's fantastic to come to work. Every day is like getting to live a science fiction dream," Leigh said. "To do science in this kind of environment is absolutely amazing."

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