The VE Lab is a multi-media and visualization facility established by the College of Architecture and Urban Studies for the research and development in the areas of virtual reality, three-dimensional graphics and multimedia applications. To effectively intervene in the environment, man made or natural, we must visualize what does not yet exist. Virtual reality may best be defined as the wide-field presentation of computer-generated, multi-sensory information, which tracks a user in real time. The VE Lab is housed in the College’s new Research and Development Facility, which provides access to design studio space, shops and other research facilities. While many schools of architecture and planning have computer facilities, none have the unique combination of resources that we have, a new building dedicated to research and an associated visualization laboratory that is used primarily for research.

The capabilities provided by the VE Lab allow us to prepare real-time animations, and analytical simulations that can be tested with faculty, users and exported to the Internet with Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML) and or to the CAVE. "CAVE", the name selected for the virtual reality theater, is both a recursive acronym (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment) and a reference to "The Simile of the Cave" found in Plato's Republic, in which the philosopher explores the ideas of perception, reality, and illusion. Plato used the analogy of a person facing the back of a cave alive with shadows that are his/her only basis for ideas of what real objects are.

The College of Architecture and Urban Studies is made of nine distinct disciplines, each with a different focus and often-different educational and professional paradigms. What brings these discordant notes into harmony is their point of convergence with respect to intervention in the environment, both man made and natural. These activities range from the planning and management of natural resources to the design and construction of individual buildings and in scale from the planning of whole cities to the design of a bathing facility. Each of these disciplines holds in common the need to visualize what does not yet exist and to judge the impact of decisions, policies, and designs prior to their implementation and to simulate the effect of interventions made to the environment in which we exist. A single building can cost five hundred million dollars, a city cost trillions of dollars, and a forest is priceless. Because of the scale, complexity and cost of the problem domain in which the disciplines of the College's operate, it is often not possible to directly test the implications of design and planning decisions. And yet we must choose between alternative designs, concepts, construction methods and product prototypes. The key to making decisions is in previewing the results. The people who inhabit the cities, work in the building buildings, and live in the homes we design need to clearly understand what we as planners, designers and contractors propose. Most lay people do not understand the documents we use to plan and build from, nor can they imagine in their mind’s eye, the three-dimensional object that would be the result. The VE Lab in conjunction with the CAVE, can empower constituents to understand the cities in which they live spatially, a family to understand an architectural plan for a house, and a physically handicapped individual to test the accessibility of a facility.