Mobile Visualization: Challenges and Solution Concepts

Relatively cheap and widely available wireless data communication services are available to the mass-market. Within the coverage of the cellular network used, the vision of information access for ‘everyone, anytime, anywhere’ has become reality. A Global Information Visualization environment can be imagined where the vision of ‘All information at your fingertip’ is reality. In this environment, every information, data, or tool available on any computer connected to the global network is directly accessible to the user. However because of the low bandwidth of wireless networks and the limited resources of mobile hardware, the handling of highly interactive distributed multimedia applications faces severe problems. The objective of ‘Mobile Visualization’ is to provide effective solutions to these problems. This paper discusses the relevant aspects of systems and data models for Mobile Visualization and tries to provide an integrative view on the field based on the vision of Global Information Systems. In addition, we describe some of the research projects in this field from our institute, the Computer Graphics Center (Darmstadt/Germany).