Abstract
Urban traffic noise situations are usually visualized as conventional 2D maps or 3D scenes. These representations are indispensable tools to inform decision makers and citizens about issues of health, safety, and quality of life but require expert knowledge in order to be properly understood and put into context. The subjectivity of how we perceive noise as well as the inaccuracies in common noise calculation standards are rarely represented. We present a virtual reality application that seeks to offer an audiovisual glimpse into the background workings of one of these standards, by employing a multisensory, immersive analytics approach that allows users to interactively explore and listen to an approximate rendering of the data in the same environment that the noise simulation occurs in. In order for this approach to be useful, it should manage complicated noise level calculations in a real time environment and run on commodity low-cost VR hardware. In a prototypical implementation, we utilized simple VR interactions common to current mobile VR headsets and combined them with techniques from data visualization and sonification to allow users to explore road traffic noise in an immersive real-time urban environment. The noise levels were calculated over CityGML LoD2 building geometries, in accordance with Common Noise Assessment Methods in Europe (CNOSSOS-EU) sound propagation methods.
Highlights
Urban noise maps today are mostly presented in a classic 2D map format, sometimes as static images, sometimes within mapping applications that allow panning, zooming, and other interactions.For most day-to-day tasks, this is appropriate and useful and will likely remain the standard for the foreseeable future
Even though software support for CityGML is sometimes lacking, there are simple ways to transform its boundary representation (B-Rep) model into a polygon mesh that is usable by modern game engines
We found that users get lost in the highly abstracted, very uniformly rendered environments, even if they had extensive knowledge of the areas being displayed
Summary
Urban noise maps today are mostly presented in a classic 2D map format, sometimes as static images, sometimes within mapping applications that allow panning, zooming, and other interactions. For most day-to-day tasks, this is appropriate and useful and will likely remain the standard for the foreseeable future This basic approach is sometimes extended to 3D representations, in order to show data that a traditional top–down view could not visualize, like a gradient of noise extending over vertical building walls [1]. This is not an easy challenge to overcome, as noise propagation computations involve tracing a large number of propagation paths through the environment and require multiple complex calculation steps for each of these paths.
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