A new approach to remote visualization of large volume data

Visualization has become an indispensible tool in gaining full extent of the simulation output at the highest possible resolution. There are three ways to do distance visualization, move data, move extracts, or move images. Moving raw data is not feasible for obvious reasons. Moving extracts, a small fraction of the data, can significantly reduce the amount of data that must be transferred over networks. Moving images can support two different modes of visualization, image-based rendering, which could require a large number of images, and video viewing, which is browsing images in sequential order. Explorable image, a compact intermediate representation of the data for deferred interaction, as a media for distance visualization can allow scientists to visualize their data anywhere anytime on any display device. Besides being a media for remote visualization, explorable image would also be a cost-effective previewing method for scientists to find the optimal view points, transfer functions, for making a high-resolution animation of the whole dataset.