Dynamic Collaborative Visualization Ecosystem (DynaCoVE)

There is no one display device or software package that is ideally suited for interactively visualizing related non-spatial, 1D, 2D, 3D, and 4D datasets. This is a major drawback, as the benefits of interactive visualization and advanced display technologies cannot be brought to bear. The Dynamic Collaborative Visualization Ecosystem (DynaCoVE) framework addresses this limitation by unifying SciVis, InfoVis, and display technology tools. Pre-existing packages are wrapped as DynaCoVE clients. This entails tracking user interactions with their GUI’s and also automatically updating them in response to cues from the DynaCoVE server. The DynaCoVE server then acts as a message broker between many collaborating clients. A messaging protocol was defined based on ZeroMQ’s majordomo protocol to enable efficient communication between clients and the server. Thus, visualization software packages that were never intended to be used together can be linked to perform cross display visual analytics. The system is intended to be data and user centric while remaining software, algorithm and display agnostic. This is accomplished in part by providing a common meta-visualization graph interface to setup cross-display visualizations. To date DynaCoVE clients for Looker, VisIt, and VTK have been tested together with traditional monitors, tiled displays, and an immersive CAVE-type system.