Stardust: Accessible and Transparent GPU Support for Information Visualization Rendering
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Date
2017
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
Web-based visualization libraries are in wide use, but performance bottlenecks occur when rendering, and especially animating, a large number of graphical marks. While GPU-based rendering can drastically improve performance, that paradigm has a steep learning curve, usually requiring expertise in the computer graphics pipeline and shader programming. In addition, the recent growth of virtual and augmented reality poses a challenge for supporting multiple display environments beyond regular canvases, such as a Head Mounted Display (HMD) and Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE). In this paper, we introduce a new web-based visualization library called Stardust, which provides a familiar API while leveraging GPU's processing power. Stardust also enables developers to create both 2D and 3D visualizations for diverse display environments using a uniform API. To demonstrate Stardust's expressiveness and portability, we present five example visualizations and a coding playground for four display environments. We also evaluate its performance by comparing it against the standard HTML5 Canvas, D3, and Vega.
Description
@article{10.1111:cgf.13178,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Stardust: Accessible and Transparent GPU Support for Information Visualization Rendering}},
author = {Ren, Donghao and Lee, Bongshin and Höllerer, Tobias},
year = {2017},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.13178}
}