Collaborative Visualization using High-Resolution Tiled Displays

We envision situation-rooms and research laboratories in which all the walls are made from seamless ultra-highresolution displays fed by data streamed over ultra-highspeed networks from distantly located visualization, storage servers, and high definition video cameras [1,6]. It will allow local and distributed groups of researchers to work together on large amounts of distributed heterogeneous datasets. From working with our collaborators at the US Geological Survey and the National Center for Microscopy and Imaging Research, we have seen how high resolution displays can be used to show detail and context simultaneously. Homeland security applications and emergency response management in particular, and the whole domain of visual analytics in general would largely benefit from the same features. We are taking the next steps toward this vision by building and using LambdaVision an 11x5 tiled display with a total resolution of 100 megapixels and developing SAGE, the Scalable Adaptive Graphics Environment. The goal is to enable scientists to explore datasets and share applications at the highest resolution available. SAGE allows the seamless display of various networked applications over the high-resolution displays. Each visualization application (such as 3D rendering, remote desktop, video streams, very large 2D maps, see Figure 1) streams its rendered pixels (or graphics primitives) to SAGE, allowing for any given layout onto the displays (e.g. the output of arbitrary M by N pixel rendering cluster nodes can be streamed to X by Y pixel display screens).