Stardust: Accessible and Transparent GPU Support for Information Visualization Rendering

• Published in: Computer graphics forum Vol. 36; no. 3; pp. 179 - 188
• Main Authors: Ren, Donghao, Lee, Bongshin, Höllerer, Tobias
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.06.2017
• Subjects: Accessibility; Augmented reality; Categories and Subject Descriptors (according to ACM CCS); Computer graphics; D.2.2 [Computer Graphics]: Software Engineering—Design Tools and Techniques; Graphics processing units; Helmet mounted displays; HyperText Markup Language; Performance enhancement; Portability; Rendering; Scientific visualization; Virtual environments; Virtual reality; Visualization; World Wide Web
• ISSN: 0167-7055; 1467-8659
• DOI: 10.1111/cgf.13178

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.