Remote Rendering and User Interaction on Mobile Devices for Scientific Visualization

Scientific data is typically analyzed using visualizations. Large high-resolution displays can facilitate the analysis process since they offer more screen real estate than desktop monitors, which allows visualizing more data in greater detail and working collaboratively. On the other hand, mobile devices like smartphones and tablets are getting more and more popular but do not have sufficient graphics capabilities for advanced scientific visualizations. In this paper, we discuss a client application for Android devices that allows to remote control a scientific visualization framework. Combining the power of remote rendering with the availability, flexibility, and mobility of mobile devices results in a ubiquitous computing solution for scientific visualization. The user interaction with a large high-resolution display is only one possible application scenario. Other scenarios include presentation of results and remote visualization. The design of our Android application fulfills the requirement of all these application scenarios.