3DIS4U: Design and Implementation of a Distributed Visualization System with a Stereoscopic Display

Abstract: Stereoscopic displays have been used in research as an aid for visualizations, but often they end up in a special room only to be used by a small selected audience. How should such a system be setup to make it more available to a larger group of users? We try to solve this by setting up the system in a regular lecture room, an environment already known by our users and by modifying software to make the transition from monoscopic displays to stereoscopic displays as smooth as possible. To improve the usability further, we choose to connect the stereoscopic installation to a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster. As a result, we offer our users to distribute their visualizations and by that the ability to use larger data sets. There are two goals for this master thesis. The first goal is to setup a stereoscopic display in a regular class room environment. The second goal is to enable distributed visualization at our graphics lab and evaluate further development in this field. The first goal is accomplished by setting up the hardware and thereafter focus on making the system more usable. Three different ways will be presented, one by using the Visualization Toolkit (VTK), another by developing a small C++ library for converting existing visualizations to the stereoscopic display. And the final option is non-invasive stereoscopic visualization with the Chromium library. The second goal is realized by installing and configuring ParaView, a visualization application for distributedvisualizations on a cluster connected to the stereoscopic display. Exploration ofalternative ways of performing visualization on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is also concluded. The result of this master thesis work is primarily a lecture room that in a matter of a few minutes is turned into a visualization studio with a stereoscopic display for up to 30 simultaneous viewers. The result is also an extended version of VTK for our stereoscopic display, a C++ library meant to help users to port their program for stereoscopic visualization and some examples on how to use Chromium for noninvasive stereoscopic rendering. Furthermore, we have made ParaView available to HPC users by installing and configuring it on one of UPPMAX clusters.