Improving Understanding of Biocide Availability in Facades through Immersive Analytics

TL;DR

This paper presents an immersive analytics system to analyze factors affecting biocide durability on facades, integrating 3D reconstruction, sensor data embedding, and interaction techniques for expert and non-expert use.

Contribution

It introduces a novel technical pipeline and interaction techniques for immersive data analysis of facade biocide durability factors.

Findings

Experts found the system beneficial for understanding complex data

The prototype facilitated insights into microbial growth and weather impacts

Immersive analytics improved data interpretation for non-experts

Abstract

The durability of facades is heavily affected by multiple factors like microbial growth and weather conditions among others. Biocides are often used to resist these factors and protect the facades. However, the biocides get washed out due to rains and other factors like geometric structure of the facade, orientation of the building. It is therefore, important to understand how these factors affect the durability of facades, leading to a requirement of expert analysis. In this paper, we propose a technical pipeline and a set of interaction techniques to support data analysis within the immersive environment for our case study. Our technical pipeline mainly consists of three steps: 3D reconstruction, embedding sensor data and visualization and interaction techniques. We made a formative evaluation of our prototype to get insights from microbiology, biology and VR experts. The remarks from the experts and the results of the evaluation suggest that an immersive analytic system in our case study could be beneficial for both experts and non-expert users.