Remote Interactive Display Technology For Multi-channel Output System

Rapid development of science and technology brings the explosion of information. So that user requirements of display technology are also getting higher and higher especially in such fields as visualization of large-scale science data, cyber-supporting telemedicine, virtual reality, CAD, business and entertainment. Due to the limitation of display size and computing resource, single channel is hard to satisfy the requirements of massive information visualization. As a result, multi-channel display applications become popular. With the increasing requirements of collaboration and efficient utilization, users can not satisfy with the limited local resources. They desire the ability to interact with those multi-channel display applications remotely. However, traditional remote desktop solutions, such as VNC, are difficult to deploy on multi-channel display application efficiently, which brings new issues for remote interaction technology.Recently, pixel-stream-based approaches are wildly used by most remote visualization interactive systems to share results of high-performance display application. However, limitations remain in exciting systems such as weak-supporting on multi-channel display applications, video processing and transmission inefficiency under mainstream network environment, unacceptable real-time performance for multi-user situation, lack of different client types and unfriendly user interface.In this paper, to overcome these inefficiencies and limitations, we design and develop a real-time remote interactive system, which supports multi-channel display applications in multi-user situation. The high-resolution result of remote application is shared by synchronized multi-channel video capturing and parallel video processing. The main technical and optimization in our system are:(1)Our system provides a shareable video stream by designing one hierarchical data structure to represent and compress the pixel streams that generated on server side. Therefore, the server performance will not shrink with the increasing of client number.(2)Compressed pixels streams are streamed selectively to the corresponding client so that we can reduce both network and client computing load. Our system supports multiple image and video compression approaches to satisfy image quality or real-time requirements in different situations.(3) Multithreading and rate control techniques are widely used to optimize performance. System obtains larger data throughput and more stable frame rate without buffer overflow or frame missing.Besides, our system provides two different client types. ControlClient, which runs on low-resolution PCs, allows user to interact with remote high-resolution application in real time. DisplayWallClient is designed for high-resolution end which owns a seamless multi-projector-driven display wall. It can connect several remote applications in the same time and provides immersive collaboration environment for a group of users. The user interface of DisplayWallClient is friendly and support both local layout management and remote interaction with applications. Experimental results show that our system achieves real time performance when simultaneously serving group users in mainstream network environment.