Immersive Segmentation
This application supports the interactive visualization and segmentation of large volumetric data sets such as the Visible Human Project. The application has a client/server design and uses a stereoscopic, haptically enabled, user interface. The application is both visually immersive and computationally immersive since the user is placed at the center of a fine-grained computational loop where user choices continuously affect the course of the segmentation algorithms. The application utilizes the Information Channel framework and can log performance data.
The application supports multiple clients that can work together in a shared environment each with an independent view of the data volume. The user interface supports several tools for controlling how the data volume is visualized. These tools support haptics allowing the user to "touch" visualized structures and in fact use the sense of "touch" as an additional control on the behavior of the segmentation algorithms. In addition to the segmentation tools, there is a tool for constructing, and immediately transporting to a client, surface model meshes of visualized structures.
The application has several unique network requirements for the data streams sent by the server to the clients. The visual stream implements a partially reliable transport protocol and consequently can operate with a small level of packet loss. The haptic stream is transported by an unreliable udp-layer protocol since the stream must continuously refresh the client's haptic model and consequently there is no value in recovering lost packets. The surface mesh stream is transported using a fully reliable protocol. Each of these streams offers different options for scalability and adaptive behavior.