UIC-2014-142 – High Power Web and Cloud Enabled Visualization Software

Current web-based collaboration systems, such as Google Hangouts, WebEx, and Skype, primarily enable single users to work with remote collaborators through video conferencing and desktop mirroring. The original SAGE software, developed in 2004 at UIC and adopted at over one hundred international sites, was designed to enable groups to work in front of large shared displays in order to solve problems that required juxtaposing large volumes of information in ultra high-resolution. Now, innovators at UIC have developed SAGE2 as a complete redesign and implementation of SAGE, using cloud-based and web-browser technologies in order to enhance data intensive co-located and remote collaboration. SAGE2 and tiled display walls create a global collaborative visualization environment that enables virtual teams of researchers to manage the scale and complexity of their data and work with one another. It is a web based middleware framework. Unlike SAGE, SAGE2 is browser based, utilizing a web server to host content, WebSockets for message passing, and HTML with JavaScript for rendering and interaction. Mark Krivchenia krivchen@otm.uic.edu (312) 996-6626