ShareX3D, a scientific collaborative 3D viewer over HTTP

In scientific visualization data are becoming more and more complex and implies cooperative effort for their post-processing analysis as well as high performance processing, resources. Moreover experts are frequently geographically distributed and existing post-processing tools do not provide high performance capability with collaborative features. To solve this limitation, a prospective action has been recently initiated in the frame of the ANR SCOS project, with the development of a web based post-processing framework called V3D. SCOS/V3D is based oil two innovating concepts: the sharing Of the processing results via the transfer of a X3D data file corresponding to the final virtual reality scene and communications based on HTTP to by-pass standard proxies and firewalls limitations. To test this approach, a proof of concept prototype, called shareX3D, has been developed, especially focusing oil the events notification, with an implementation of the long polling technique. The architecture of ShareX3D and first tests are presented and discussed.