Using mobile devices to access remote visualisations

Abstract

Visualisation is widely used in many areas to help people interpret data. People may wish to share the visualisation that they are currently using with others. Mobile devices provide one way to share a visualisation, but they have limitations for visualisation compared to the use of standard desktop in terms of memory, graphics hardware and CPU performance. In this thesis, a remote visualisation approach is used to overcome some of these limitations. As the Paraview visualisation system can operate in client-server mode, the focus is on investigating a solution that can efficiently transfer visualisations from the Paraview system onto a smart phone. The solution developed is an application that can view and update the rendered image generated from the existing visualisation system. The visualization system does not need to be re-built or installed on the smart phone. End users can easily retrieve the correct visualization without complex user configuration. In order to generate correct visualisation without having to re-build the client for the mobile device, the thesis uses a gateway approach acting as middleware to communicate between the render server (Paraview system) and our generic client (running on smart phone). The gateway handles all of the requests between the user and the server which runs locally to the gateway. The gateway passes the final rendered image to the smart phone via the network for display and interacting. An end user trial is conducted to evaluate and compare the usability of the smart phone client with the traditional desktop client. The results showed that using gateway as a middleware is a useful approach for a smart phone to manipulate the visualisation with the Paraview system. The customised visualisation application on the smart phone is simple, without having to store data and without installing Paraview system on the device.