Collaborative Visualisation
Visualisation has a different meaning to different people. However, it can be loosely defined as the process of representing abstract data as images that can aid in understanding the meaning of the data. So for some people, it might be the ability to see their designs as life like as possible, or it could be interpreting the geological data from the surface of Mars - so you can see different disciplines have different requirements for visualisation. However, the common theme that users of visualisation have is they wish to gain insight into their data. The car designer wants to see how the car, that hasn't been built, will look in different environments, or in different lighting conditions. The oil company geologists visualise their data to find the most advantageous site for their next drill platform - potentially saving them millions of pounds. The architect wishes to see how his building will look in the place where it will be built.
How do we Visualise?
People use computers to generate their data and typically a monitor to see what they have created, usually all done in isolation. The data explosion has hit every aspect of our working lives, we can generate models of the most complex environments down to the very last detail, we can design entire planes and ships down to the last nut and bolt. Computers are now generating oceans of data, which would have left the user drowning in a sea of numbers a few years ago for example, car companies use Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to model their cars crashing. The average computer on everyones desk is faster than the supercomputer of yesterday, adding to the data explosion.
However, with this increase in data, the actual size of the monitor that people use has hardly changed in the recent times. It has not kept pace with the speed of the processor, indeed, until recently the standard workstation resolution was 1280x1024. So the fact is, we are looking at more and more data on the same resolution screen, this means that the detail that we are calculating is becoming so small on the screen that we cannot see it. To see the detail, the user would have to constantly have to zoom in and zoom out again to identify detail, losing the bigger picture.
As our projects have increased in size and complexity, no one single person can have knowledge of every single aspect of the project; be this drug discovery, or how an engine fits into a car assembly. We have created our own islands of knowledge.
Visualisation can bridge these two problems by creating large collaborative systems, that take the software and display it on much higher resolution displays, allowing our research and design teams to collaborate together.
Remote Collaboration
Collaboration is not just limited to groups of people together. With advent of high speed networks, we can collaborate remotely, via application sharing and using typically a teleconferencing application.
It is not unusual now for a company's experts to be located in different locations given the complexity of todays products. Today, instead of travelling many miles for meetings, remote collaboration can be used to reduce travel time and increase productivity. IBM Deep Computing Visualisation (DCV) software can be used to collaborate with dis-located groups, it allowing users to see the same application in a number of different locations. This has a number of benefits:
- Reduced travelling
- Data does not have to leave the company, data security
- Convenience
We have Collaborated with IBM and Fakespace (a Mechdyne company) to provide our visualisation solutions. We set out in the following pages a number of examples taken from various industries.
But let us remember
"So how will digital prototyping ultimately succeed? It’s not hardware or software that makes or breaks digital prototyping - it’s people. Great people can overcome marginal or bad hardware and software, but marginal people can cause the best hardware and software to fail. Digital prototyping is really no different than any other technical endeavour with regard to the absolute importance of the people factor in its success.”
(Jeffrey Rowe, CADALYST)
For more information or to contact us, please e-mail: info@ocf.co.uk.
