Paraview Collaboration

Liza Kolev Spring '23

Version 5.10.1

How To Collaborate

In order to collaborate in OpenVR, you need to ensure you have loaded in the OpenVR plugin. You can do so by going to 'Manage Plugins' under Tools, select 'OpenVR', and click 'Load Selected' at the bottom right of the plugins screen.

Then, once you have opened your file in your desktop Paraview, you can go over to the OpenVR box. The OpenVR box is usually on the right of your data visualization, but if it is not open automatically after loading the plugin, you can go to 'View' and check OpenVR.

On your headset, enter Virtual Desktop so that you can see the Paraview app. The next steps have to be done ONE partner at a time in order for the visualization to be seen by both of you.

In the OpenVR box, click ‘Send to Open VR’. Underneath Collaboration, change your name to what you would like your partner to see in the server, and then click ‘Connect’. Now, your partner can do the same. The port is automatically 5555. This should not be changed as it will give an error. Now, you should be able to see your partner in VR as a skeleton and your data visualization.

The collaboration setup is based off this Paraview forum discussion as other tutorials could not be found.

General Comments on Collaboration

In OpenVR collaboration, you can see your partner and the data visualization. While you can see your partner move around and the partner's name, you cannot see any changes your partner makes to the data visualization. This may be due to misunderstanding of how to load the data in to setup collaboration, but cannot be sure as I had tested with a partner different orders of putting data in or one of us putting the data in. If only one of us loads data before connecting to the server, the other was not able to see the data.

If there are more than 2 people on the server, it appears Paraview crashes. It is still unclear if this is due to the collaboration capabilities or the Paperspace machine itself not being able to keep up. In addition, it is bizarre that we are not able to change the port number: this means when a bunch of people want to work collaboratively, they all appear in the same server, making it crash.