AN INTERACTIVE REMOTE VISUALIZATION SYSTEM FOR MOBILE APPLICATION ACCESS

This paper introduces a remote visualization approach that enables the visualization of data sets on mobile devices or in web environments. With this approach the necessary computing power can be outsourced to a server environment. The developed system allows the rendering of 2D and 3D graphics on mobile phones or web browsers with high quality independent of the size of the original data set. Compared to known terminal server or other proprietary remote systems our approach offers a very simple way to integrate with a large variety of applications which makes it useful for real-life application scenarios in business processes

Distributed OpenGL Rendering in Network Bandwidth Constrained Environments

Display walls made from multiple monitors are often used when very high resolution images are required. To utilise a display wall, rendering information must be sent to each computer that the monitors are connect to. The network is often the performance bottleneck for demanding applications, like high performance 3D animations. This paper introduces ClusterGL; a distribution library for OpenGL applications. ClusterGL reduces network traffic by using compression, frame differencing and multi-cast. Existing applications can use ClusterGL without recompilation. Benchmarks show that, for most applications, ClusterGL outperforms other systems that support unmodified OpenGL applications including Chromium and BroadcastGL. The difference is larger for more complex scene geometries and when there are more display machines. For example, when rendering OpenArena, ClusterGL outperforms Chromium by over 300% on the Symphony display wall at The University of Waikato, New Zealand. This display has 20 monitors supported by five computers connected by gigabit Ethernet, with a full resolution of over 35 megapixels. ClusterGL is freely available via Google Code

Capturing natural-colour 3D models of insects for species discovery

Collections of biological specimens are fundamental to scientific understanding and characterization of natural diversity. This paper presents a system for liberating useful information from physical collections by bringing specimens into the digital domain so they can be more readily shared, analyzed, annotated and compared. It focuses on insects and is strongly motivated by the desire to accelerate and augment current practices in insect taxonomy which predominantly use text, 2D diagrams and images to describe and characterize species. While these traditional kinds of descriptions are informative and useful, they cannot cover insect specimens "from all angles" and precious specimens are still exchanged between researchers and collections for this reason. Furthermore, insects can be complex in structure and pose many challenges to computer vision systems. We present a new prototype for a practical, cost-effective system of off-the-shelf components to acquire natural-colour 3D models of insects from around 3mm to 30mm in length. Colour images are captured from different angles and focal depths using a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera rig and two-axis turntable. These 2D images are processed into 3D reconstructions using software based on a visual hull algorithm. The resulting models are compact (around 10 megabytes), afford excellent optical resolution, and can be readily embedded into documents and web pages, as well as viewed on mobile devices. The system is portable, safe, relatively affordable, and complements the sort of volumetric data that can be acquired by computed tomography. This system provides a new way to augment the description and documentation of insect species holotypes, reducing the need to handle or ship specimens. It opens up new opportunities to collect data for research, education, art, entertainment, biodiversity assessment and biosecurity control.Comment: 24 pages, 17 figures, PLOS ONE journa

Remote rendering for virtual reality on mobile devices

Nowadays it is possible to launch complicated VR applications on mobile devices, using simple VR goggles, e.g. Google Cardboard. Nevertheless, this opportunity has not been introduced to the wide use yet. One of the reasons is the low processing power even of the hi-end devices. This is a massive obstacle for mobile VR technologies. One of the solutions is to render the high-quality 3D world on a remote server, streaming the video to the mobile device

Web-based Stereoscopic Collaboration for Medical Visualization

Medizinische Volumenvisualisierung ist ein wertvolles Werkzeug zur Betrachtung von Volumen- daten in der medizinischen Praxis und Lehre. Eine interaktive, stereoskopische und kollaborative Darstellung in Echtzeit ist notwendig, um die Daten vollständig und im Detail verstehen zu können. Solche Visualisierung von hochauflösenden Daten ist jedoch wegen hoher Hardware- Anforderungen fast nur an speziellen Visualisierungssystemen möglich. Remote-Visualisierung wird verwendet, um solche Visualisierung peripher nutzen zu können. Dies benötigt jedoch fast immer komplexe Software-Deployments, wodurch eine universelle ad-hoc Nutzbarkeit erschwert wird. Aus diesem Sachverhalt ergibt sich folgende Hypothese: Ein hoch performantes Remote- Visualisierungssystem, welches für Stereoskopie und einfache Benutzbarkeit spezialisiert ist, kann für interaktive, stereoskopische und kollaborative medizinische Volumenvisualisierung genutzt werden. Die neueste Literatur über Remote-Visualisierung beschreibt Anwendungen, welche nur reine Webbrowser benötigen. Allerdings wird bei diesen kein besonderer Schwerpunkt auf die perfor- mante Nutzbarkeit von jedem Teilnehmer gesetzt, noch die notwendige Funktion bereitgestellt, um mehrere stereoskopische Präsentationssysteme zu bedienen. Durch die Bekanntheit von Web- browsern, deren einfach Nutzbarkeit und weite Verbreitung hat sich folgende spezifische Frage ergeben: Können wir ein System entwickeln, welches alle Aspekte unterstützt, aber nur einen reinen Webbrowser ohne zusätzliche Software als Client benötigt? Ein Proof of Concept wurde durchgeführt um die Hypothese zu verifizieren. Dazu gehörte eine Prototyp-Entwicklung, deren praktische Anwendung, deren Performanzmessung und -vergleich. Der resultierende Prototyp (CoWebViz) ist eines der ersten Webbrowser basierten Systeme, welches flüssige und interaktive Remote-Visualisierung in Realzeit und ohne zusätzliche Soft- ware ermöglicht. Tests und Vergleiche zeigen, dass der Ansatz eine bessere Performanz hat als andere ähnliche getestete Systeme. Die simultane Nutzung verschiedener stereoskopischer Präsen- tationssysteme mit so einem einfachen Remote-Visualisierungssystem ist zur Zeit einzigartig. Die Nutzung für die normalerweise sehr ressourcen-intensive stereoskopische und kollaborative Anatomieausbildung, gemeinsam mit interkontinentalen Teilnehmern, zeigt die Machbarkeit und den vereinfachenden Charakter des Ansatzes. Die Machbarkeit des Ansatzes wurde auch durch die erfolgreiche Nutzung für andere Anwendungsfälle gezeigt, wie z.B. im Grid-computing und in der Chirurgie

Foveated Encoding for Large High-Resolution Displays

Collaborative exploration of scientific data sets across large high-resolution displays requires both high visual detail as well as low-latency transfer of image data (oftentimes inducing the need to trade one for the other). In this work, we present a system that dynamically adapts the encoding quality in such systems in a way that reduces the required bandwidth without impacting the details perceived by one or more observers. Humans perceive sharp, colourful details, in the small foveal region around the centre of the field of view, while information in the periphery is perceived blurred and colourless. We account for this by tracking the gaze of observers, and respectively adapting the quality parameter of each macroblock used by the H.264 encoder, considering the so-called visual acuity fall-off. This allows to substantially reduce the required bandwidth with barely noticeable changes in visual quality, which is crucial for collaborative analysis across display walls at different locations. We demonstrate the reduced overall required bandwidth and the high quality inside the foveated regions using particle rendering and parallel coordinates

Relevance-driven acquisition and rapid on-site analysis of 3d geospatial data

One central problem in geospatial applications using 3D models is the tradeoff between detail and acquisition cost during acquisition, as well as processing speed during use. Commonly used laser-scanning technology can be used to record spatial data in various levels of detail. Much detail, even on a small scale, requires the complete scan to be conducted at high resolution and leads to long acquisition time, as well as a great amount of data and complex processing. Therefore, we propose a new scheme for the generation of geospatial 3D models that is driven by relevance rather than data. As part of that scheme we present a novel acquisition and analysis workflow, as well as supporting data-models. The workflow includes on-site data evaluation (e.g. quality of the scan) and presentation (e.g. visualization of the quality), which demands fast data processing. Thus, we employ high performance graphics cards (GPGPU) to effectively process and analyze large volumes of LIDAR data. In particular we present a density calculation based on k-nearest-neighbor determination using OpenCL. The presented GPGPU-accelerated workflow enables a fast data acquisition with highly detailed relevant objects and minimal storage requirements.State of Lower-SaxonyVolkswagen Foundatio