From Desktop to Web: WASM-Enabled Ubiquitous Visualization.

Abstract

Open standards for representing and exchanging interactive 3D scenes and data is a critical capability needed to publish visualization and graphics to the web. X3D, the successor to VRML, is a leading provider of such capabilities, enabling integration with web services, supporting cross-platform execution, and facilitating inter-application data exchange. Building on the capabilities of X3D and other open data standards, the addition of cross-platform, shareable execution modules implemented via generalized programming languages provides additional powerful web deployment capabilities. To this end, we have developed execution models based on the emerging open standards WebAssembly (WASM) and WebGPU. WASM transforms complex code, in our case C++, into portable, secure, and performant modules supported by web browsers; while WebGPU enables cross-platform graphics and processing capabilities. In this paper we describe how we use WASM and WebGPU to build cross-platform web applications using the C++ VTK toolkit as the underlying graphics and visualization engine.