Distributed Collaborative Visualization Using Light Field Rendering

Interactive distributed visualization is an emerging technology with numerous applications. However, many of the present approaches of interactive distributed visualization are based on the traditional polygonal processing graphics pipeline. Our research is centred on investigating an alternative method using Image-Based Rendering (IBR) which uses (multiple) images of the scene instead of a 3D geometrical representation. A key advantage to the use of IBR techniques is that the bandwidth required is independent of scene complexity and is therefore predictable given knowledge of the desired final image resolution. In this paper, we describe our IBR based interactive distributed visualization platform involving Light Field rendering and present results which indicate the scalability of our approach to accommodate multiple collaborative users. To our knowledge this is the first system to demonstrate deployment of interactive Light Field rendering to large numbers of distributed users.