Combining VR Visualization and Sonification for Immersive Exploration of Urban Noise Standards

Abstract

Urban traffic noise situations are usually visualized as conventional 2D maps or 3D scenes. These representations are indispensable tools to inform decision makers and citizens about issues of health, safety, and quality of life but require expert knowledge in order to be properly understood and put into context. The subjectivity of how we perceive noise as well as the inaccuracies in common noise calculation standards are rarely represented. We present a virtual reality application that seeks to offer an audiovisual glimpse into the background workings of one of these standards, by employing a multisensory, immersive analytics approach that allows users to interactively explore and listen to an approximate rendering of the data in the same environment that the noise simulation occurs in. In order for this approach to be useful, it should manage complicated noise level calculations in a real time environment and run on commodity low-cost VR hardware. In a prototypical implementation, we utilized simple VR interactions common to current mobile VR headsets and combined them with techniques from data visualization and sonification to allow users to explore road traffic noise in an immersive real-time urban environment. The noise levels were calculated over CityGML LoD2 building geometries, in accordance with Common Noise Assessment Methods in Europe (CNOSSOS-EU) sound propagation methods.

Raumbezogene Visualisierung trifft auf Landschaftsforschung und „Pinballology“: Beispiele der Landschaftskonstruktion in Flipperspielen

“…Thanks to developments in neighboring academic disciplines and related industries, such as gaming, informatics and (other) engineering fields, the opportunities for enhancing the visualization of geographic space are undergoing a permanently ongoing development. This leads to new variants of media that can include many new facets and features, such as high-quality sound (e.g., Berger and Bill 2019;Edler and Vetter 2019;Indans et al 2019;Hruby 2019;Lammert-Siepmann et al 2017;Schito and Fabrikant 2018), information graphics (Dunlap and Lowenthal 2016;Meier 2017;Schiewe 2017), 3D animation (Edler et al 2018a;Kersten et al 2018;Lovett et al 2015), and gamified interaction techniques (Ahlqvist 2011;Kapenekakis and Chorianopoulos 2017;Lütjens et al 2019)-to name just a few examples that are intensively discussed in recent international literature of cartography and related disciplines.…”

Official Survey Data and Virtual Worlds—Designing an Integrative and Economical Open Source Production Pipeline for xR-Applications in Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises

“…Berger and Bill [17] are developing a multi-sensorial VR application for the immersive experience of urban traffic noise. They use the format COLLADA for import into Unity.…”

Visualizing Multilayered Geospatial Data in Virtual Reality to Assess Public Lighting

“…A recent survey through the field provides an insight into its many facets (Fonnet, Prié, 2019), and some advances have been made specifically in relation to exploring urban environments, however usually by visualizing 3D city models with some added information (Chen et al, 2017b, Berger, Bill, 2019, or utilizing the 3D environment to analyze one aspect of urban data from a new perspective (Filho et al, 2019).…”