Making the Invisible Visible—Strategies for Visualizing Underground Infrastructures in Immersive Environments

Abstract

Visualization of underground infrastructure in an interactive 3D immersive environment is extremely important for efficient management of city’s infrastructure. This paper describes different geometric modelling approaches to illustrate appropriate visualization of such data. A multimodal prototype has been developed by exploiting different algorithms to render these invisible underground objects as part of an urban model. This prototype has been integrated in an immersive geographic information system (GIS), named MultiVis, for handheld iOS and Android devices. As a part of the study, three distinct strategies have been tested; the first is based on the use of transparencies to convey a sense of depth, the second relies on an image-space superposition of “ditches” on top of the rendered frame and the third is a world-space deformation of the elevation model that exposes the underground elements. Furthermore, a comparative user experience analysis of different techniques aimed to the geometrically accurate visualisation of utility networks and other underground facilities are performed and evaluated. It includes a set of user evaluations for different parameters of these techniques, which gives us an insight on how the proposed methods affect the experience and usability for technical and non-technical users.

A Review of Augmented Reality Applications in Civil Infrastructure During the 4th Industrial Revolution

“…Traditionally, abstaining location information required merging data from blueprints, historical records, dead reckoning, and aboveground sensors, which are time-consuming and lack accuracy (Li et al, 2015). The leading solutions today to solve the localization problem consist of utilizing the GPS and ground penetrating radar (GPR) (Kaddioui et al, 2019;Ortega et al, 2019). Dai et al (2011) proposed an analytical approach compiled with GPS to incorporate virtual underground infrastructure into site photos to provide more invisible information.…”

Underground Land Administration from 2D to 3D: Critical Challenges and Future Research Directions

“…Therefore, the 3D visualisation of underground assets has been considered in recent decades. Some studies have developed and tested different applications for visualising 3D underground assets [12,14,56,82,[86][87][88][89][90][91][92][93][94][95][96][97]. However, there are still limitations in platforms used for efficiently visualising underground assets.…”

An Efficient, Platform-Independent Map Rendering Framework for Mobile Augmented Reality

“…One important aspect of AR visualization is the combination of real and virtual information. If a traditional visualization pipeline is used for AR visualization, it should be modified to reflect a combination of real and virtual information [11]. Based on continued AR development, Keil et al [22] revised their initial survey to highlight how AR systems require a good registration process that can align virtual and physical objects accurately.…”

“…Lag occurs when the ArcGIS map data volume is large [23]. Mapbox AR does not support 2D and 3D integrated AR map visualization, does not support groundproximity visualization, does not support Web browser AR map symbol visualization, and does not support iOS operating system AR map symbol visualization [11,24].…”

“…Game engines such as Unity3D support spatial data integration and enable the use of popular AR Software Development Kits (ARKit, ARCore, etc.) to develop spatial AR and Virtual Reality (VR) applications via extension plugins [11][12][13][14][15]. Traditional GIS vendors such as ESRI have recently started to integrate AR and VR capabilities into their GIS products [16][17][18].…”