The Tele-Immersive Data Explorer: A Distributed Architecture for Collaborative Interactive Visualization of Large Data-sets

Abstract

There exist a number of scientific visualization systems designed to provide a two-dimensional interface to the user. However, little consideration has been given to the development of collaborative virtual environments for visualization purposes. This paper discusses the Tele-Immersive Data Explorer a generalizable framework to facilitate the construction of domain-specific data exploration applications challenged with the problem of having to visualize massive data-sets immersively and collaboratively. In the paper we describe the framework's conceptual organization, its distributed multiprocessed objectoriented architecture, and its application to visualize gridded scalar data. KEYWORDS Tele-immersion, collaborative virtual reality, data mining, multivariate data, annotations, persistent environments, design patterns. 1 INTRODUCTION Research scientists and engineers need to analyze massive data sets generated by intensive computational simulations, geographic information systems...