Interactive, Internet Delivery of Scientific Visualization viaStructured, Prerendered Multiresolution Imagery

We present a novel approach for highly interactive remote delivery of visualization results. Instead of real-time rendering across the internet, our approach, inspired by QuickTime VR's Object Movieconcept, delivers pre-rendered images corresponding to different viewpoints and different time steps to provide the experience of 3D and temporal navigation. We use tiled, multiresolution image streaming to consume minimum bandwidth while providing the maximum resolution that a user can perceive from a given viewpoint. Since image data, a viewpoint and time stamps are the only required inputs, our approach is generally applicable to all visualization and graphics rendering applications capable of generating image files in an ordered fashion. Our design is a form of latency-tolerant remote visualization, where visualization and Rendering time is effectively decoupled from interactive exploration. Our approach trades off increased interactivity, flexible resolution (for individual clients), reduced load and effective reuse of coherent frames between multiple users (from the servers perspective) at the expense of unconstrained exploration. A normal web server is the vehicle for providing on-demand images to the remote client application, which uses client-pull to obtain and cache only those images required to fulfill the interaction needs. This paper presents an architectural description of the system along with a performance characterization for stage of production, delivery and viewing pipeline