Collaborative visualization in rich media environments

Abstract

In this article we present our approach of combining open and sophisticated technologies in order to establish an integrated rich media environment for collaborative visualization processes. Aiming to support comprehensive visualization settings of spatially separated domain specialists, we deploy remote render farms for producing the visualization of complex datasets as video streams, separately for every collaboration partner. This makes our system capable also for low-end mobile devices, which only have to be able to render MEPG-4 compliant video streams. The cooperation support is provided by a full-featured CSCW system including a shared whiteboard based on the platform independent Eclipse framework. The visualization objects are embedded in the CSCW system's persistent object space and presented by the rich media view of the shared whiteboard. Starting with a basic scenario of collaborative visualization we will present the architecture of the combined visualization and CSCW systems and the design of the plug-in based shared whiteboard. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.