2D/3D web visualization on mobile devices

Visualization is able to present the rich Web information intuitively and make the Web search/mining more productive. Mobile computing is able to provide the flexibility of working anytime and anywhere. Therefore, it is natural to combine the two techniques for intriguing applications. However, the technical limitations of mobile devices make it difficult to port well-designed visualization methods from desktop computers to mobile devices. In this paper, we present what we learned on engineering 3D Web visualization on both high-end and low-end mobile devices as the MWeb3D framework, which forms a distributed pipeline that move intensive computation from the mobile devices to server systems. Some important issues of this strategy include: (1) separating visualization from graphics rendering, (2) encoding visual presentation for transmitting via bandwidth-limited wireless connections, (3) user interaction on mobile devices, and (4) highly efficient graphics rendering on the mobile devices. We will show fruitful experiments on both PDA and mobile phone with photos taken from both simulator and real mobile devices.