A Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (better known by the recursive acronym

Recursive acronym

A recursive acronym is an acronym or initialism that refers to itself in the expression for which it stands...

 CAVE) is an immersive

Immersion (virtual reality)

Immersion is the state of consciousness where an immersant's awareness of physical self is diminished or lost by being surrounded in an engrossing total environment; often artificial. This mental state is frequently accompanied with spatial excess, intense focus, a distorted sense of time, and...

 virtual reality

Virtual reality

Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...

 environment where projectors are directed to three, four, five or six of the walls of a room-sized cube

Cube

In geometry, a cube is a three-dimensional solid object bounded by six square faces, facets or sides, with three meeting at each vertex. The cube can also be called a regular hexahedron and is one of the five Platonic solids. It is a special kind of square prism, of rectangular parallelepiped and...

. The name is also a reference to the allegory of the Cave

Allegory of the cave

The Allegory of the Cave—also known as the Analogy of the Cave, Plato's Cave, or the Parable of the Cave—is an allegory used by the Greek philosopher Plato in his work The Republic to illustrate "our nature in its education and want of education"...

 in Plato

Plato

Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...

's Republic

Republic (Plato)

The Republic is a Socratic dialogue written by Plato around 380 BC concerning the definition of justice and the order and character of the just city-state and the just man...

where a philosopher contemplates perception, reality and illusion.
The CAVE is a large theatre sited within a larger room. The walls of the CAVE are made up of rear-projection screens, and the floor is made of a down-projection screen.