Scientific visualization tools are unnecessarily complicated to use. This complexity increases the time required to gain insight into a given data set, and thus inhibits casual use. The difficulty arises from the need to support data from a large variety of sources and the need to support a wide variety of visualization algorithms. Though the number of data file formats is unbounded, the format of any given data set can be described using a small set of parameters. Further, the set of visualization algorithms applicable to a given type (e.g. dimensionality) of data is small and the number of these algorithms commonly used in a specific scientific domain is even smaller. These two insights have led the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) to the development of a new tool for scientific visualization. This tool dramatically simplifies data importation and visualization algorithm selection through user-directed semi-automation. The strategy is consistent with a larger trend in data analysis and visualization towards ease of use.
This tool, called EnVision, aims to achieve an interface similar to Google Maps, making the visualization process easy and helping to make scientific visualization a more common activity for researchers.
EnVision is a tool to remotely visualize dataset through a web browser. It allows you to transparently user remote visualization resources through a thin web based client from anywhere in the world.
via YouTube – EnVIsion Scientific Visualization Through Web Browser.
You may be interested in technology from Calgary Scientific that does not require a whole new application or rendering engine – it recreates existing GUIs remotely in a browser and manages the transport of your application’s renderings for you. The user interface can be remapped on the fly to accommodate refactoring into diverse client footprints. I’m familiar with many existing tools (from SGI, HP, etc) and believe this to be superior and well designed for Cloud based deployment of existing applications. Check us out at http://www.calgaryscientific.com/products/pureweb.html
I have tried EnVision in the past, and it works fairly well. The version I tried was an earlier version with not as many features.
There are three concerns that I have with EnVision. The first is on its security. Being at a government lab, data security is paramount. The second, is that it works well on data sets that were large 8 years ago. However, what was considered large then, is small now. I am not sure how well it would work on a 40 TB data set. The third concern is how well it would work with time series data.
If this really works as well as it does in the demo video, this could be huge…we’ve been wanting/needing a browser-based 3D Vis tool for many many years.