Collaborative visualization

Abstract

Collaborative visualization is becoming more and more important, given the distributed and mobile nature of teams. Current visualization systems are often still monolithic and not flexible enough for todays users; they have not kept pace with improvements in other areas of information technology (mobile networking, compute-on-demand). With this in mind, we review current visualization systems (covering CAE collaborative visualization, multi-user online games and solutions to bring collaboration to existing applications/processes) and contrast against the latest related advances in technology: new hardware platforms, availability of cloud computing, mobile network capabilities and web browser functionality. We then analyse how these advances could impact on future collaborative visualization systems and discuss potential areas of improvement to existing systems.