Live Integrated Visualization Environment: An Experiment in Generalized Structured Frameworks for Visualization and Analysis

Many immersive visualization systems require custom coding and specialized hardware and software to function properly. A number of commercial products provide some of this functionality, but lack fully immersive tracking and controls. Additionally, these environments have been traditionally limited to real time data feeds and analysis. The Live Integrated Visualization Environment is a framework developed to address these limitations, while allowing for best of breed integration of commercial products, government software, and open source software. By combining a custom developed messaging bus with a web service implementation, a dynamic, interactive immersive environment is provided across a number of platforms including CAVEs, touch tables, single wall displays, and desktops. We provide an architecture discussion including driver capabilities to enable quick development of additional data sources with existing visualization applications. We conclude with a discussion of several projects that successfully utilize the framework for real-time big data and geospatial applications for a range of tasks. We include a brief introduction to recent work for an open source and cross platform replacement of the framework.