Interactive visualization of large-scale architectural models over the grid: Strolling in Tang Chang'an city

Abstract

Virtual reconstruction of the ancient Chinese Chang'an city has been continued for ten years at the National University of Singapore. Motivated by sharing this grand city with people who are geographically distant and equipped with normal personal computers, this paper presents a practical Grid-enabled visualization infrastructure that is suitable for interactive visualization of large-scale architectural models. The underlying Grid services, such as information service, visualization planner and execution container etc, are developed according to the OGSA standard. To tackle the critical problem of Grid visualization, i.e. data size and network bandwidth, a multi-stage data compression approach is deployed and the corresponding data pre-processing, rendering and remote display issues are systematically addressed. © 2005 Springer.