Cspray: a Collaborative Scientiic Visualization Application

We present the design and implementationof Collaborative Spray or CSpray (pronounced \sea spray"). CSpray is a CSCW (Computer Supported Cooperative Work) application geared towards supporting multiple users in a collaborative scientiic visualization setting. Scientists are allowed to share data sets, graphics primitives, images, and create visualization products within a view independent shared workspace. CSpray supports incremental updates to reduce network traac, separates large data streams from smaller command streams with a two level communication strategy, provides diierent service levels according to client's resources, enforces permissions for diierent levels of sharing, distinguishes private from public resources, and provides multiple fair and intuitive oor control schemes for shared objects. OO the shelf multimedia tools such as nv and vat can be used concurrently. CSpray is based on the spray rendering visualization interaction technique to generate contours, surfaces, particles, and other graphics primitives from scientiic data sets such as those found in oceanography and meteorology.