Visualization Mail (V-Mail)

V-Mail is a framework of cross-platform applications, interactive techniques, and communication protocols for improved multi-person correspondence about spatial 3D datasets. Please check out our paper:

Jung Who Nam, Tobias Isenberg, and Daniel F. Keefe. V-Mail: 3D-Enabled Correspondence about Spatial Data on (Almost) All Your Devices. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 30(4):1853–1867, April 2024. doi: 10.1109/TVCG.2022.3229017. An open access paper version is available on HAL.

If you use the code in this repository we would appreciate a citation of our paper.

Bibtex

@article{Nam:2024:V3C,
  author      = {Nam, Jung Who and Tobias Isenberg and Daniel F. Keefe},
  title       = {{V}-{M}ail: {3D}-Enabled Correspondence about Spatial Data on (Almost) All Your Devices},
  journal     = {IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
  year        = {2024},
  volume      = {30},
  number      = {4},
  month       = apr,
  pages       = {1853--1867},
  doi         = {10.1109/TVCG.2022.3229017},
  shortdoi    = {10/kt43},
  doi_url     = {https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2022.3229017},
  oa_hal_url  = {https://hal.science/hal-03924707},
  osf_url     = {https://osf.io/qehvs/},
  url         = {https://www.sculpting-vis.org/VMail.html},
  github_url  = {https://github.com/JungWhoNam/VisualizationMail},
  github_url2 = {https://github.com/JungWhoNam/VisualizationMailServer},
  github_url3 = {https://github.com/JungWhoNam/BrainTensorVis/tree/vmail},
  video       = {https://youtu.be/SCTlARovRBY},
}

Related GitHub Repos

• PC/Mac, Android V-Mail Clients
  • https://github.com/JungWhoNam/VisualizationMail
• V-Mail Server (this current repo)
  • https://github.com/JungWhoNam/VisualizationMailServer

Visualization Mail (V-Mail) Server

The server is composed of a MySQL Database and a file storage. PHP scripts in this repo handles server-side scripting.

Run the server application

The easiest way to run this application is using the docker image, which provides resources for running LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) applications. This project is already structured to work with the docker container.

• PHP files are placed under app.
• mysql/ folder is there to make the SQL persistent.
• run starts the server using the docker image.

Steps to run this application:

1. Install docker
2. Clone this repo
3. Run the script run
4. Create vmails database and vmails table (see the next section)
5. (Optional) Specify your db configurations in app/ConnectionSettings.php

app/phpinfo.php is provided for a simple test. Type http://localhost/phpinfo.php in your browser to see if the server is working.

MySQL Specifications

The table is composed of five fields, and ID is an auto-increment primary key field in the db.

Here are example entires.

Or use app/create_vmails_table.sql, a SQL dump file, to create the table.

# create `vmails` table in `vmails` database
mysql vmails < /app/create_vmails_table.sql