Visualization Across the Pond:
How a Wireless PDA can display and navigate remotely located Million-Polygon Datasets via 9,000km of Cable

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) dataset, courtesy of Martin Connell and Mark
Bastin, SHEFC Brain Imaging Research Centre for Scotland

The DTI/EPSRC funded Resource Aware Visualization Environment project (RAVE), one of the e-Science projects presently being undertaken at the Welsh e-Science Centre in Cardiff, UK, was presented live to a large audience at the Supercomputing 2004 conference held November 6th-12th in Pittsburgh,USA.

The RAVE system demonstrated a wireless PDA displaying and interacting with a large medical dataset which would normally overwhelm this device by its sheer size and complexity.

Dr. Ian Grimstead demonstrated how the actual dataset was being reflected and rendered by RAVE web services at WeSC and the images transferred to SC2004 for display by the PDA. The image streaming enabled the PDA user to navigate the dataset at interactive rates.

The use of Web services enabled a heterogeneous set of equipment to be used, ranging from the PDA (running C++/QTopia), to a laptop (running Java), to an SGI Onyx 300 (running Java), with systems running SGI IRIX, Fedora Linux, Embedded Linux and Microsoft Windows. The deployment of a UDDI server permitted the user to add new servers without informing each client of their availability; this was used to add a server locally at the booth at SC2004 which was then generally available to RAVE, including Cardiff.

Dr. Grimstead explained "The example we presented was a million-polygon Diffusion Tensor Imaging dataset; such a dataset would overwhelm a machine without a fast graphics accelerator, so being able to interact with it from a PDA shows the flexibility of RAVE. This allows doctors to remotely view, share and navigate complex medical datasets whilst away from their department, without needing specialist rendering equipment. Our next challenge is to demonstrate RAVE working on a mobile telephone."

This is the first time a PDA has interactively collaborated using remote rendering and web services over a trans-Atlantic link. Full details of the technical architecture and performance metrics can be obtained from http://www.wesc.ac.uk/projects/rave/