Papers
Automatic Flythrough Authoring In Vr
Robin Schmidiger ETH
Romana Rust ETH
Roi Poranne University of Haifa/ETH
The visualization and presentation of architectural models in virtual reality enables architects to evaluate their designs and present their architectural models to stakeholders, improving the fidelity of architectural communication in architectural design. They can better examine the models in an immersive environment and have a better understanding of the final product, which helps to align stakeholder expectations with the actual design. (Davila Delgado et al., 2020). Virtual walkthrough or flythrough animations (Graf and Yan 2008), also known as trajectories (Gebhardt et al. 2016), are a powerful tool to convey the architectural concept and the unique features of the planned building. However, creating such animations is a rather tedious process. It involves manually setting keypoints at the places of interest and in between, which are then interpolated to create the trajectory. This often results in awkward camera poses, sharp turns, intersection with geometry and clipping problems, etc., all of which must be resolved by tweaking or adding new keypoints. Furthermore, the process requires the designer to constantly switch between an inside view of the structure, for local refinements, and an outside overview, for more global adjustments. We present a novel, interactive design tool for walkthroughs in VR to address these issues. Our tool automatically provides a set of ideal keypoints, based on a customizable set of objectives, such as spatial coverage and visibility. Utilizing trajectory optimization and path planning techniques (Yang et al. 2016), our tool instantly generates a complete and smooth trajectory that passes through all keypoints and does not clip through geometry. The efficiency of the algorithms allows our tool to run at interactive rates, in the sense that the designer is able to tweak the positions of the keypoints, or any other parameters, and observe the newly computed trajectory instantaneously. Our VR interface allows more refined editing compared to traditional inputs, and allows having both an inside view and overview simultaneously, transcending standard visualization methods. We evaluate the performance of our system compared to a traditional walkthrough creation processes, e.g. using a 3D modeller or a game engine, both on test structures and a real building (DFAB-House (Graser et al. 2020)). Our study shows significant improvements when using our system. In the paper we first present the key components of this VR interface. Then we describe the user study and finally, an evaluation of the results. References: Davila Delgado, J. M., Oyedele, L., Demian, P., & Beach, T. (2020). A research agenda for augmented and virtual reality in architecture, engineering and construction. Advanced Engineering Informatics, 45, 101122. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aei.2020.101122 Graser, K., Baur, M., Apolinarska, A., Dörfler, K., Hack, N., Jipa, A., Lloret, E., Sandy, T., Pont, D., Hall, D., & Kohler, M. (2020). DFAB HOUSE – A Comprehensive Demonstrator of Digital Fabrication in Architecture (p. 139). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv13xpsvw.21 Graf, R. and Yan, W. (2008).Automatic Walkthrough Utilizing Building Information Modeling to Facilitate Architectural Visualization. in eCAADe 2008 C. Gebhardt, B. Hepp, T. Nägeli, S. Stevsic, and O. Hilliges, “Airways: Optimization-based planning of quadrotor trajectories according to high-level user goals,” inAir-ways: Optimization-Based Planning of Quadrotor Trajectories according to High-Level User Goals, 05 2016, pp. 2508–2519. L. Yang, J. Qi, D. Song, J. Xiao, J. Han, and Y. Xia, “Survey of robot 3d path planning algorithms,”Journal of Control Science and Engineering, vol. 2016, 2016.
Keywords: Walkthrough Design, Design Optimization, Virtual Reality, Sdg12 Responsible Consumption And Production