Improving Understanding of Biocide Availability in Facades through Immersive Analytics

Abstract

The durability of facades is heavily affected by multiple factors like microbial growth and weather conditions among others. Biocides are often used to resist these factors and protect the facades. However, the biocides get washed out due to rains and other factors like geometric structure of the facade, orientation of the building. It is therefore, important to understand how these factors affect the durability of facades, leading to a requirement of expert analysis. In this paper, we propose a technical pipeline and a set of interaction techniques to support data analysis within the immersive environment for our case study. Our technical pipeline mainly consists of three steps: 3D reconstruction, embedding sensor data and visualization and interaction techniques. We made a formative evaluation of our prototype to get insights from microbiology, biology and VR experts. The remarks from the experts and the results of the evaluation suggest that an immersive analytic system in our case study could be beneficial for both experts and non-expert users.

Media

Proposed pipeline: (a) Capturing images or videos for 3D reconstruction. (b) Embedding sensor data from the building facade for data processing. (c) Integrating external data sources into the virtual reality environment. (d). Immersive visualization using virtual reality headsets for analyzing and evaluating data.

Publication

Negar Nouri, Snehanjali Kalamkar, Forouzan Farzinnejad, Verena Biener, Fabian Schick, Stefan Kalkhof, Jens Grubert. Improving Understanding of Biocide Availability in Facades through Immersive Analytics. In Adjunct Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality 2022 (ISMAR 2022), pp.98-103. arxiv preprint