Visual Data Navigators“Collaboratories”

Abstract

“Collaborative Visualization” refers to development of scientific understanding, which is mediated by scientific visualization tools in a collaborative context. A “Collaboratory” is a visual computing environment allowing project teams to collaborate and share data and insight while distributed over a network, using intuitive visual navigation techniques “Visual Conference Calls”. The distributed architecture is based on Application Component Sharing and a network abstraction system for games providing real-time data interactivity. The innovation can be summarised as the integration of network technology used in collaborative games with 3D data navigation techniques and based on a low-level, fine-grained “atomic” component infrastructure, implemented and validated in real-world environments. In this paper we focus on 3D medical imaging tools describing a collaboratory implementation of a “VolumeViewer”. A Web based application component for 2D and 3D visualizations of MRI, CT and scientific 3D volume data that supports peerto-peer collaborative sessions on PC desktops. The EC funded research project SMARTDOC proposes how collaborative visual data navigation technology, with Web-enabled application sharing, can be used routinely. The SMARTDOC project is also a blueprint to inform researchers and software engineers about the possibility to extend existing visualisation applications to support collaboration, e.g. making it easier to “collaboratize” visualization applications.