Volume Visualization on Mobile Devices

Abstract

With the advent of high-bandwidth wireless networks and pervasive computing, the space and platform barriers for visualization are being broken. Mobile visualization, or ubiquitous visualization, allows users to visualize data anywhere, anytime, on various mobile devices connected by wireless networks. In this paper, we investigate how to achieve volume visualization on mobile devices. We present a client-oblivious data model for various visualization tasks on mobile devices ranging from powerful workstations to PDAs and cell phones. Our model integrates volumes and some pre-computed features, such as iso-surfaces, into one hierarchical structure, which can be compressed and progressively transmitted over networks. Two novel algorithms are introduced. One is for mesh reconstruction from point-based models and the other is for volume reconstruction from surfacebased models. The construction, compression, and transmission of our data model are presented. 1.