Streaming visualization for collaborative environments

Abstract

Connecting expensive and scarce visual data analysis resources to end-users is a major challenge today. We describe a flexible mechanism for meeting this challenge based on commodity compression technologies for streaming video. The advantages of this approach include simplified application development, access to generic client components for viewing, and simplified incorporation of improved codecs as they become available. In this paper we report newly acquired experimental results for two different applications being developed to exploit this approach and test its merits. One is based on a new plugin for ParaView that adds video streaming cleanly and transparently to existing applications. The other is a custom volume rendering application with new remote capabilities. Using typical datasets under realistic conditions, we find the performance for both is satisfactory. © 2008 IOP Publishing Ltd.