Collaborative visualisation with RAVE

Back to index page

Previous article: OGSA-DAI based data integration projects at AIST

Next article: Boost for e-Social Science (and obesity) with launch of new NCeSS nodes

Producing data is becoming easier due to the advances in Grid technology, but there remains a problem: how to visualise the results? We can use portals to ease access to remote compute facilities, but then we have to organise our own local display capabilities – which may not be able to cope with the resulting dataset. Then there’s the problem of sharing the results with collaborators…

There is now a visualisation solution available from OMII-UK. OMII-RAVE is a collaborative, distributed rendering environment that runs with minimal local installation. It can run on a whole range of devices, from low-end mobile devices through to high-end workstations, and is supported across multiple operating systems (including Linux and Microsoft Windows). OMII-RAVE achieves support for a wide range of platforms by utilising remote services to host the data and, optionally, remote rendering the views of a dataset to avoid overwhelming the local client.

OMII-RAVE is initially released with support for VTK and Wavefront OBJ file formats, but other formats are in preparation (such as Ensight Gold). OMII-RAVE serves as a good first step to providing a collaborative means of viewing datasets. We hope people will try OMII-RAVE and it will whet their appetite for such distributed visualisation services, leading the way for more complex and capable systems in the future.

Ian Grimstead, RAVE.

www.tinyurl.com/63o2wg

www.tinyurl.com/63x37w