Real-time Collaborative Scientific WebGL Visualization with WebSocket

In scientific visualization, data are becoming more and more important and usually implies a cooperative effort. Moreover experts are usually geographically distributed, therefore they need collaborative tools to work efficiently. To solve this limitation, a prospective action has been recently initiated, with the development of a web based application for collaborative interaction based on two innovating technologies: WebGL and WebSocket. To demonstrate this approach, a prototype has been developed based on the Visible Patient project. In this paper we present the architecture of the proposed system, the initial implementation experiment and a comparison with current technologies. Finally we discuss the future work and potential improvements.