 The first GeoWall was built in January 2001 by Prof. Jason Leigh at the Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, home of the Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE), when asked by Paul Morin if a stripped-down single-wall CAVE would provide a level of 3D immersion acceptable for exploring geoscience data at a price affordable to smaller institutions like museums and academic departments.So instead of a complete CAVE, it was only a single wall, and being used primarily for geology, it was a "geology wall" or GeoWall.Shortly after the first GeoWall was built, the GeoWall Consortium was created to support the development and distribution of software and data for the GeoWall users.