Voxer—a platform for creating, customizing, and sharing scientific visualizations

Scientific visualizations offer domain experts the ability to explore data visually and interactively to gain insights from data. Most visualization systems focus on functionality and scalability. However, we believe that with the advent of faster rendering techniques and higher-speed networks, accessibility for every device should also be a goal for scientific visualizations. In this paper, we propose a novel scientific visualization system, Voxer, which provides ubiquitous visualizations by decoupling user interfaces from system space. In Voxer, we encapsulate the data processing and rendering functionality as a web service and design a module-based user interface for domain experts to create and customize different visualization pipelines in response to their specific requirements. These configured visualizations can be shared with the public through embedding visualizations on the web and interactively rendering on the server. Use cases and benchmarks are used to demonstrate how our system can help domain experts easily create and customize visualizations and improve visualizations accessibility.