Multimodal location based services-semantic 3D city data as virtual and augmented reality

Abstract

The visualization of cross-domain spatial data sets has become an important task within the analysis of energy models. The representation of these models is especially important in urban areas, in which the under-standing of patterns of energy production and demand is key for an efficient city planning. Location Based Services (LBS) provide a valuable addition towards the analysis and visualization of those data sets as the user can explore the output of different models and simulations in the real environment at the location of interest. Towards this aim, the present research explores mobile alternatives to the visual analysis of temporal data series and 3D building models. Based on the fields of numerical simulation, GIS and computer graphics, this work presents a novel mobile service that allows exploring urban models at different Level of Details (LoDs) using well-known standards such as CityGML. Ultimately, the project enables researchers, city planners and technicians to explore urban energy datasets in an interactive and immersive manner as Virtual Globes, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. Using models of the city of Karlsruhe, the final service has been implemented and tested on the iOS platform providing an empirical insight on the performance of the system. In addition, this research provides a holistic approach by developing one application that is capable of seamlessly change the visualization mode.