Developing a GIS-Based Visual-Acoustic 3D Simulation for Wind Farm Assessment

Abstract

Public landscape impact assessment of renewable energy installations is crucial for their acceptance. Thus, a sound assessment basis is crucial in the implementation process. For valuing landscape perception, the visual sense is the dominant human sensory component. However, the visual sense provides only partial information about our environment. Especially when it comes to wind farm assessments, noise produced by the rotating turbine blades is another major impact factor. Therefore, an integrated visual and acoustic assessment of wind farm projects is needed to allow lay people to perceive their impact adequately. This paper presents an approach of linking spatially referenced auralizations to a GIS-based virtual 3D landscape model. We demonstrate how to utilize a game engine for 3D visualization of wind parks, using geodata as a modeling basis. In particular, the controlling and recording of specific parameters in the game engine is shown in order to establish a link to the acoustical model. The resulting prototype has high potential to complement conventional tools for an improved public impact assessment of wind farms.

Short-term annoyance reactions to stationary and time-varying wind turbine and road traffic noise: A laboratory study

“…Sound synthesis for WTN was realized using the tools of Pieren et al (2014) and Heutschi et al (2014), which were developed within the research project VisAsim (Manyoky et al, 2014). As a sound source, one single 2 MW Vestas V90 turbine (three blades, hub height ¼ 95 m, rotor diameter ¼ 90 m, Vestas, Aarhus, Denmark) at an operation mode "strong wind" conditions was synthesized.…”

Depth camera indoor mapping for 3D virtual radio play

“…Game engines (for example, Trenholme and Smith, ) have been extensively used to create interactive virtual environments. Application areas include gaming and entertainment, urban planning (Herwig and Paar, ; Greenwood et al., ), landscape visualisation (Manyoky et al., ), construction (Shiratuddin and Thabet, ) and cultural heritage (Anderson et al., ). The term serious gaming has been used with applications containing game‐like elements, such as tasked interaction (Bellotti et al., ); one of the most common applications being education (Arhippainen et al., ).…”

Geovisualization with immersive virtual environments in theory and practice

“…Based on VR replicas of the relevant species (section 6.2), Unreal Engine (UE) was used to generate a GeoIVE application where the user can navigate through the study area in a completely independent manner. While both the integration of 3D visualization into geographic information systems (GIS) and importation of GIS data into 3D computer graphics software are already available, direct compatibility between GIS and VR output devices is as yet limited (Manyoky et al 2014). Middleware (e.g.…”