Understanding Next-Generation VR: Classifying Commodity Clusters for Immersive Virtual Reality

Commodity clusters offer the ability to deliver higher performance computer graphics at lower prices than traditional graphics supercomputers. Immersive virtual reality systems demand notoriously high computational requirements to deliver adequate real-time graphics, leading to the emergence of commodity clusters for immersive virtual reality. Such clusters deliver the graphics power needed by leveraging the combined power of several computers to meet the demands of real-time interactive immersive computer graphics.However, the field of commodity cluster-based virtual reality is still in early stages of development and the field is currently adhoc in nature and lacks order. There is no accepted means for comparing approaches and implementers are left with instinctual or trial-and-error means for selecting an approach.This paper provides a classification system that facilitates understanding not only of the nature of different clustering systems but also the interrelations between them. The system is built from a new model for generalized computer graphics applications, which is based on the flow of data through a sequence of operations over the entire context of the application. Prior models and classification systems have been too focused in context and application whereas the system described here provides a unified means for comparison of works within the field

Graphics Hardware Implementation of the Parameter-Less Self-Organising Map

This paper presents a highly parallel implementation of a new type of Self-Organising Map (SOM) using graphics hardware. The Parameter-Less SOM smoothly adapts to new data while preserving the mapping formed by previous data. It is therefore in principle highly suited for interactive use, however for large data sets the computational requirements are prohibitive. This paper will present an implementation on commodity graphics hardware which uses two forms of parallelism to signi¯cantly reduce this barrier. The performance is analysed experi- mentally and algorithmically. An advantage to using graphics hardware is that visualisation is essentially free", thus increasing its suitability for interactive exploration of large data sets

Visualisation Support for Managing Large Business Process Specifications

This paper proposes a visualization technique to support the modelling and management of large business process specifications. The technique uses a set of criteria to produce views of the specification that exclude less relevant features. The proposed approach consists of three steps: assessing the relevance of nodes, reducing the specification, and presenting the results. Algorithms and methods are presented for these steps along with examples

A spreadsheet approach to facilitate visualization of uncertainty in information

Information uncertainty is inherent in many problems and is often subtle and complicated to understand. Although visualization is a powerful means for exploring and understanding information, information uncertainty visualization is ad hoc and not widespread. This paper identifies two main barriers to the uptake of information uncertainty visualization: first, the difficulty of modeling and propagating the uncertainty information and, second, the difficulty of mapping uncertainty to visual elements. To overcome these barriers, we extend the spreadsheet paradigm to encapsulate uncertainty details within cells. This creates an inherent awareness of the uncertainty associated with each variable. The spreadsheet can hide the uncertainty details, enabling the user to think simply in terms of variables. Furthermore, the system can aid with automated propagation of uncertainty information, since it is intrinsically aware of the uncertainty. The system also enables mapping the encapsulated uncertainty to visual elements via the formula language and a visualization sheet. Support for such low-level visual mapping provides flexibility to explore new techniques for information uncertainty visualization

Visualisation of information uncertainty : progress and challenges

Information uncertainty which is inherent in many real world applications brings more complexity to the visualisation problem. Despite the increasing number of research papers found in the literature, much more work is needed. The aims of this chapter are threefold: (1) to provide a comprehensive analysis of the requirements of visualisation of information uncertainty and their dimensions of complexity; (2) to review and assess current progress; and (3) to discuss remaining research challenges. We focus on four areas: information uncertainty modelling, visualisation techniques, management of information uncertainty modelling, propagation and visualisation, and the uptake of uncertainty visualisation in application domains