Once the initial system is designed, engineers are sent to the boiler site to install the injection system and often encounter unforeseen obstacles that prevent placement of the injectors in the locations designated by the initial design. In this case, it would be highly beneficial for the on-site engineers to collaborate quickly with the off-site applications experts to redesign the system. For this collaboration to be effective, both groups need to interact simultaneously with the computational model as though they were in the same location.
The incorporation of a second visualization environment to allow these remote collaborations is straightforward using the CAVEComm libraries developed at Argonne National Laboratory. The CAVEcomm communication library uses a client-server model in which a broker is used to mediate the communication between the particle tracking code and one or more CAVE environments. Each active component of the system must register itself with the broker and subsequently subscribe to the data streams it would like to monitor. For instance, to view the location of the remote user in the virtual boiler space the two CAVEs subscribe to the head and wand tracking data of the other CAVE. This tracking data is then used to plot an avatar representating the user in the remote CAVE as illustrated in the figure above.