Collaborative 3D Visualization with CSpray

Abstract:

As networking technology brings us into the information age, 3D and multimedia applications become more prevalent and the emerging norm. Improvements in communication infrastructure also allow us to explore the realm of group interaction and collaboration over the information superhighway. Our work focuses on providing a small group of geographically distributed scientists the means of sharing their data and interactively creating visualizations and analyzing them. This allows for shorter turn around time compared to more traditional means which in turn allows for greater research productivity. The key features of our system include: different levels of information sharing, incremental updates to reduce network traffic, an intuitive floor control strategy for coordinating access to shared resources, a built in session manager to handle participants who either join late or leave early, and a host of collaborative 3D visualization aids. An added feature is that while the system is designed for small group collaborations, it can also be used for briefing a larger audience. These features are included in the CSpray collaborative 3D visualization system.

Keywords:

data sharing, scientific visualization, floor control, session management, shared virtual workspace, multimedia, ATM, computer supported collaborative work.

Demos:

A three-way live demo of this work was conducted between IEEE Visualization'94 in Washington, D.C., ACM Multimedia'94 in San Francisco, and UCSC on October 19 and 20 1994.

Another live demo was conducted between UCSC and the Supercomputing conference in San Diego on December 1995 with ATM switches.

Paper:

A pdf version of the paper to appear in the special joint issue between IEEE Multimedia and IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications on 3D and Multimedia on the Information Superhighway to appear on March, 1997 can be obtained by clicking here. There are two sidebars that go with the paper. One is on spray, and the other is on the cspray architecture.

Images:

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