Also, the user is able to rotate, scale and otherwise reposition the viewpoint with respect to these images without exiting the hypermedia browser software.

The control and interaction of viewing the image may be provided within the same window that the browser is using assuming the environment is a "windowing" environment.

The viewing transformation and volume rendering calculations may be performed by remote distributed computer systems.

Once an image representing a new viewpoint is computed the frame image is transmitted over the network to the user's client computer where it is displayed at a designated position within a hypermedia document.

By transmitting only enough information to update the image, the need for a high bandwidth data connection is reduced.

Compression can be used to further reduce the bandwidth requirements for data transmission.

Other applications of the invention are possible.

For example, the user can operate a spreadsheet program that is being executed by one or more other computer systems connected via the network to the user's client computer.

Once the spreadsheet program has calculated results, the results may be sent over the network to the user's client computer for display to the user.

In this way, computer systems located remotely on the network can be used to provide the computing power that may be required for certain tasks and to reduce the data bandwidth by only transmitting results of the computations.

Still other applications of the present invention are possible, as disclosed in the specification, below.