The visualization and multimedia equipment must be located at the user sites. The scientific data represented as images, will need to be stored on either videotape or disk, and redisplayed with a high-resolution video system. In addition, basic editing capability should be available to construct presentations of scientific material. The system must be available for use by the scientific teams that need these resources and for presenting information to visitors. A mechanism should also be explored to facilitate at least scaled down versions of the visualizations to the WWW.
The current state-of-the-art graphics accelerator can render about two million polygons per second. To allow ER scientists to begin viewing complex scenes at interactive rates, a 3x or six million polygons per second is probably required. Depending on the visualization rendering paradigm, pixel fill rates could become the bottleneck to rendering performance. A high performance graphics system (HPGS) must provide a minimum of 160 million textured, anti-aliased pixels per second. This fill rate is available on a few systems today but will become more common in future generations.