Collaborative volume visualization with applications to underwater acoustic signal processing

Distributed collaborative visualization systems represent a technology whose time has come. Researchers at the Fraunhofer Center for Research in Computer Graphics (CRCG) have been working in the areas of collaborative environments and high-end visualization systems for several years. The medical application, TeleInvivo, is an example of a system which marries visualization and collaboration. With TeleInvivo, users can exchange and collaboratively interact with volumetric data sets in geographically distributed locations. Since examination of many physical phenomena produce data that are naturally volumetric, the visualization frameworks used by TeleInVivo have been extended for nonmedical applications. The system can now be made compatible with almost any dataset that can be expressed in terms of magnitudes within a three dimensional grid. Coupled with advances in telecommunications, telecollaborative visualization is now possible virtually anywhere. Expert data quality assurance and analysis can occur remotely and interactively without having to send all the experts into the field. Building upon this point-to-point concept of collaborative visualization, one can invision a larger pooling of resources (i.e, connecting ships of oppurtunity of members of a deployed battle group) to form a large collaborative overview of a region of interest from contributions of numerous distributed members.