Visual data navigators "Collaboratories"

A "Collaboratory" is a lightweight application component allowing project teams to collaborate and share data and insight while distributed over a network, using intuitive visual navigation techniques. The innovation can be summarised as the integration of network technology used in collaborative games with a 3D data navigation technique based on a low-level, fine-grained, customisable "atomic" visualization component infrastructure. The paper focuses on 3D medical imaging tools describing a Collaboratory implementation of a "Volume Viewer". This paper is also a blueprint to inform researchers and software engineers about the possibility to extend existing visualisation applications to support collaboration, e.g. making it easier to "collaboratize" visualization applications based on Microsoft\´s DirectX class library.