Perceptual Rules for Building Enhancements in 3D Virtual Worlds

Abstract While the generation of geometric 3D virtual models has become feasible to a great extent, the enrichment of the resulting urban building models with semantics remains an open research question in the field of geoinformation and geovisualisation. This additional information is not only valuable for applications like Building Information Modeling (BIM) but also offers possibilities to enhance the visual insight for humans when interacting with that kind of data. Depending on the application, presenting users the highest level of detail of building models is often neither the most informative nor feasible way. For example when using mobile apps, resources and display sizes are quite limited. A concrete use case is the imparting of building use types in urban scenes to users. Within our preliminary work, user studies helped to identify important features for the human ability to associate a building with its correct usage type. In this work we now embed this knowledge into building category-specific grammars to automatically modify the geometry of a building to align its visual appearance to its underlying use type. If the building category for a model is not known beforehand, we investigate its feature space and try to derive its use type from there. Within the context of this work, we developed a Virtual Reality (VR) framework that gives the user the possibility to switch between different building representation types while moving in the VR world, thus enabling us in the future to evaluate the potential and effect of the grammar-enhanced building model in an immersive environment.