Viewdows: A Low-Latency Web Visualization Framework for Multi-Windows

The increasing prevalence of multiple-monitor configurations has created new opportunities for data exploration and analysis. These setups allow users to distribute multiple visualization windows across different monitors, providing an expansive workspace for data analysis. However, existing multi-window visualization tools often rely on server infrastructure to synchronize content and interaction states across different windows. To address this issue, we introduce Viewdows, a web-based framework that enables seamless cross-window visualization via inter-process communication, eliminating the need for server infrastructure and network connections. Viewdows adopts a hybrid coordinator-worker architecture, where a central coordinator manages the overall state of the visualization system, while worker nodes communicate and synchronize directly with each other through a broadcast channel. This approach minimizes synchronization latency, enhances self-reliance and scalability, and maintains a lower level of complexity compared to peer-to-peer architectures. We showcase the benefits of Viewdows by conducting a benchmark evaluation and user study. Our performance benchmarks and user study reveal that Viewdows efficiently handles multiple windows with low synchronization latency while providing an improved user experience compared to existing solutions.