Scalable web-embedded volume rendering

In this paper, we develop a method to encapsulate and embed interactive 3D volume rendering into the standard web Document Object Model (DOM). The package we implemented for this work is called Tapestry. Using Tapestry, data-intensive and interactive volume rendering can be easily incorporated into web pages. For example, we can enhance a Wikipedia page on supernova to contain several interactive 3D volume renderings of supernova volume data. There is no noticeable slowdown during the page load by the web browser. A user can choose to interact with any of the volume renderings of supernova at will. We refer to each embedded 3D visualization as a hyperimage. Hyperimages depend on scalable server-side support where volume rendering jobs are performed and managed elastically. We show the minimal code change required to embed hyperimages into previously static web pages. We also demonstrate the supporting Tapestry server's scalability along several dimensions: web page complexity, rendering complexity, frequency of rendering requests, and number of concurrent sessions. Using solely standard open-source components, this work proves that it is now feasible to make volume rendering a scalable web service that supports a diverse audience with varying use cases.