MobileViz - EMCL

MobileViz – Interactive Scientific Visualization on Mobile Devices

Aims and Objectives

Scientific computing plays an increasingly important role in all branches of science and engineering, where it complements the classical methodologies of theory and experimentation by providing powerful tools to analyze data and make predictions about systems. The design and use of these tools requires a high level of expertise, as does the interpretation of the data that is produced, which can be very extensive. To realize the full potential of scientific computing, however, it will be necessary to make the results directly accessible to people who are not specialists in this field, such as decision makers in the government and industry, and the general public.

The aim of MobileViz project is to address this challenge by providing interactive access to visualizations of scientific data using mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets. Their use is in many regards more intuitive than that of conventional computers, and they can automatically provide contextual information about the location of the user. In particular, they enable the application of Augmented Reality techniques to enhance the undertanding of simulated data in a particular setting.

Research Topics

The MobileViz project develops new ideas and methods at the intersection of a variety of different fields of applied mathematics and computer science. A central theme is the creation of a platform for remote visualization of large data sets on high-performance computers, which involves scientific visualization and distributed computing. To be able to efficiently interact with the visualization on mobile devices over networks with relatively low bandwidth, the project is also concerned with the development of reduced representations of three-dimensional data, which combines techniques from computer graphics and numerical optimization. Finally, various application scenarios are explored, which require the use of specialized high-performance numerical simulations.

Funding

Project E! 5643 MobileViz is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), EUREKA and the European Commission through the Eurostars Programme. http://www.eurostars-eureka.eu/

Partners

TechViz, Paris: visualization solutions for 3D applications
iXpoint, Ettlingen, Germany and Münsingen, Switzerland: development of mobile applications

People from EMCL

Prof. Dr. Vincent Heuveline
Maximilian Hoecker
Sebastian Ritterbusch
Staffan Ronnas

Contact

Staffan Ronnas

Conferences

The First International Conference on Advanced Communications and Computation INFOCOMP, October 2011, Barcelona, Spain
The Second International Conference on Advanced Communications and Computation INFOCOMP, October 2012 Venice, Italy
International Supercomputing Conference 2013, June 2013, Leipzig, Germany

Publications

V. Heuveline, S. Ritterbusch, S. Ronnas, “Augmented Reality for Urban Simulation Visualization”, First International Conference on Advanced Communications and Computation (INFOCOMP 2011), 2012 (Best Paper Award)
A. Helfrich-Schkarbanenko, V. Heuveline, R. Reiner, S. Ritterbusch,“Bandwidth-Efficient Parallel Visualization for Mobile Devices”, Second International Conference on Advanced Communications and Computation (INFOCOMP 2012), 2013