Combined Web-Based Visualisation of 3D Point Clouds and Acoustic Descriptors: An Interdisciplinary Challenge

Abstract

This paper presents an online application—called 3D integrator—enabling visual cross-examinations of architectural and acoustic data on web browsers and explains the rationale behind its development. The tool consists of a series of overlays developed over the Potree 3D point cloud renderer. It is used to display visually, in an interactive environment, the 3D point clouds resulting from a survey protocol tailored to the specific needs of the corpus under scrutiny—15 small-scale edifices often referred to as “minor heritage assets”—and to the research’s overall ambition, reasoning on architectural and acoustic features at an interdisciplinary level. One of the tool’s distinctive features is to project abstract information (acoustic descriptors) in a “close to real” 3D space (point clouds), hence merging scientific visualisation and information visualisation practices. The paper first shortly sums up the particularities of the survey protocol and discusses the implementation of the analytical add-ons that have been introduced (visual trace of the survey protocol itself, volume calculation, and exploratory 3D representation of acoustic descriptors). It then focuses on use cases that illustrate what the approach helps to observe concerning the interiors of edifices when capturing and co-examining dimensional and acoustic features.

Documentation and Virtualisation of Vernacular Cultural Heritage: The Case of Underground Wine Cellars in Atauta (Soria)

“…Robust image configurations are required for projects in which precision may be a priority; this is conducted to ensure that users can enjoy an interactive, detailed, and up-todate experience by means of immersive visualisations, thus creating the sensation of being at the site from a remote location. However, if the aim is to add more characteristics-for example, acoustic descriptors-than is provided by the tool itself, i.e., beyond graphic representation, then the usefulness of point clouds is clearly limited [64].…”

Rediscovering Cultural Heritage Sites by Interactive 3d Exploration: A Practical Review of Open-Source Webgl Tools

“…The library permits to easily customise the visualisation, selecting 3D objects in the scene (e.g., clouds, vector data, oriented images) and giving users the ability to make measurements, annotations, and cross-sections on the elements. Due to its flexibility of use, this tool is widely adopted for different purposes, ranging from architecture applications, structural health monitoring and technical analysis data gathering (Bergerot et al, 2022). Similarly, another JavaScript-based WebGL called Cesium JS allows to build interactive web applications for rendering a large variety of 2D and 3D geospatial data, including orthophotos, meshes, digital elevation models and point clouds.…”