HYDROSYS - A Mixed Reality Platform for On-Site Visualization of Environmental Data

Modern mobile devices and networks facilitate the development of increasingly graphical and complex mobile GIS or geomedia applications. We advance the state-of-the-art with the HYDROSYS system, a heterogeneous platform integrating multiple data sources and components, allowing interactive environmental data analysis and monitoring in the field. Our key contributions are 1) scalable on-the-fly streaming of environmental sensor data, 2) highly graphical mixed reality representations embedding multivariate sensor data visualizations, including access to results of near real time simulations and other physically-based computations, 3) support for semantically meaningful public participation. We balance the use of standardized formats and optimized mobile transmissions. Our system builds on use cases ranging from hydrological professionals and municipal authorities to the environmentally-aware public. We present the challenges, solutions and implementation of the system, providing observations on potential bottlenecks.

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