Visualization of multidimensional data on distributed mobile devices using interactive video streaming techniques

摘要

Remote visualization of large datasets has been a challenge for distributed systems for a long time. This challenge is getting even bigger when visualization refers to devices with limited capabilities, like CPU and GPU power, number of RAM or screen size. In this paper we present a distributed system we have developed for interactive visualization of remote datasets on variety of modern mobile devices, including laptops, tablets and phones. In our system all the data are rendered on dedicated servers, compressed on-the-fly using a video codec and pushed to client as a single video stream. Based on this model we have taken off most of the computational power from client's devices, leaving them with a video decompression. We were also able to achieve very high frame rates and video quality, dynamically adapted to device capabilities and current network bandwidth of a client. Our system can be used with almost any kind of data, including 2D, 3D and even animated 3D data. All of them are being processed in real time based on user inputs, with minor latency, allowing interactive visualization. At the end of this paper we also present some preliminary results of system performance gained using sample, multidimensional medical datasets.