Kitware Releases ParaView Glance: An Advanced In-Browser Data Viewer

Kitware is proud to announce the release of ParaView Glance.

ParaView Glance brings together the latest web technologies for interactive scientific data visualization in your browser.  It can be launched from web pages or from your desktop to quickly view volume rendered images, geometries, molecules, point clouds, and much more.

Kitware is committed to providing long-term support for ParaView Glance.  It builds upon years of scientific visualization experience at Kitware. It is part of Kitware’s ParaView platform, as a lightweight, stand-alone, web-based visualization application that complements the powerful desktop and web-based tools already provided by ParaView for high-performance computing.  As with the other components of the ParaView platform, it is being released as freely available, open source software that invites community adoption and adaptation. Kitware is also extending its software consulting services to utilize ParaView Glance when creating custom solutions for our customers.

Several sample datasets are included with ParaView Glance.  It can be launched by visiting:

https://kitware.github.io/paraview-glance/app/

Documentation and source code are also available online:

https://kitware.github.io/paraview-glance/doc/

https://github.com/Kitware/paraview-glance

ParaView Glance is currently targeted for desktop browsers.  Support for touch-screen tablets and phones is coming soon.

Integration with Cloud Services

ParaView Glance is also being made available as a Girder plugin.  ParaView Glance is particularly powerful when paired with web-based data management and processing systems, such as Girder which is part of Kitware’s Resonant platform.   As users browse data stored in Girder, the ParaView Glance Plugin can be set to use ParaView Glance to visualize an interesting data item with a single point-and-click, without leaving the web browser. See our online demonstration (click on the “eye” next to an item to view it in ParaView Glance – if data loading fails, please disable your ad blocker).  

Advanced JavaScript Technologies

ParaView Glance is built upon Kitware’s VTK.js and ITK.js toolkits.   These JavaScript toolkits enable the creation of applications that run in web pages and that do not require a website visitor to explicitly install any software.  The methods in these toolkits include GPU-accelerated visualization techniques, advanced processing algorithms in WebAssembly, and support for a wide variety of data formats.  Applications built using these toolkit can work with data on a local machine or communicate with centralized compute servers and data management systems. These toolkits are continuously tested to ensure that they work with multiple web browsers, running on a variety of operating systems.

Integrative Solutions

We see the blending of ParaView, Resonant, VTK, and ITK, as demonstrated by ParaView Glance, as an extremely powerful combination of tools for creating streamlined user experiences in the fields of medicine, computer vision, scientific computing and data analytics.  Each of those components is the product of tens of thousands of hours of software development by experts at Kitware and around the world. Their coordinated integration by Kitware provides value that extends far beyond those individual efforts. If you wish to discuss how this technology stack can help your products and processes, please contact us at kitware@kitware.com.

Acknowledgements

Beyond the VTK.js and ITK.js toolkits, ParaView Glance is also built upon years of scientific and web application development experience at Kitware that was gained while working on numerous grants funded by the DoE, DoD, NIH, and other agencies as well as many commercial contracts.  In particular, the ParaView Glance work was funded, in part, by NIH R01EB021396, R01EB014955, and R41NS086295. For a more complete list of sponsors, see the pages maintained by ParaView, VTK, and ITK.  We are grateful to our sponsors for their past, ongoing, and future support.