APPLICATIONS: Computer & Information Sciences Advanced Networking Infrastructure & Research |
TeraVision: Visualization Streaming Over Optical Networks |
TeraVision is a hardware-assisted, high-resolution graphics streaming system for the Access Grid, enabling anyone to deliver a presentation without having to install or configure any software or distribute any data files in advance. A user who wants to give a presentation on a laptop or show output from a node of a graphics cluster simply plugs the VGA or DVI output of the computer into the TeraVision Box. The box captures the signal at its native resolution, and digitizes and broadcasts it to another networked TeraVision Box, which is connected to a PC and DLP projector. Two Boxes can be used to stream stereoscopic computer graphics. Multiple Boxes can be used for an entire tiled display. TeraVision synchronizes both image capture at the source and image display at the destination. By decoupling image generation from image capture and transmission, the host graphics system operates at optimal frame rates. In five years, TeraVision will be like Television, enabling scientists to simply dial into their streamed visualization. For a 20-node tiled display, they will need ~10Gbps without image compression. This provides a resolution of 5120 x 3072 in 24-bit color at 30 frames per second. Acknowledgment: USA National Science Foundation EIA-9802090, ANI-9730202, ANI-0129527 and ACI-9619019 (to the National Computational Science Alliance); Microsoft Research; and, Quanta. Contact Jason Leigh Electronic Visualization Laboratory (EVL) at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), USA spiff@evl.uic.edu Collaborators Jason Leigh, Rajvikram Singh, Vikas Chowdhry, Eric He, EVL at UIC, USA www.evl.uic.edu/cavern/teranode/teravision |