Mobile web-based lightweight and real-time roaming algorithm for large-scale WebBIM scenes

Abstract

With the popularity of mobile terminals, including smart phones, there is a great push for users to share large-scale data on phone webpages. This study considers building information modeling (BIM) as the core smart construction technology and leverages, its classical data format — industry foundation classes (IFC) as the input data format, and presents a mobile & web-based lightweight and real-time roaming algorithm for large-scale WebBIM scenes. To comply with the semantics information in IFC files and with a buildings structure, our method focuses on creating a more lightweight product, by not relying exclusively on geometry faces as ordinary visualization programs do. Our main idea for optimizing mobile, web-based, lightweight and real-time roaming is threefold: reduce redundancies, generate an efficient hybrid data structure and design dynamic load/unload strategies. In the study, a prototype system was integrated and leveraged for experimentation. The final performance analysis shows that we can significantly reduce the redundancy to about 70 percent of the raw BIM scenes. Meanwhile, our method can maintain the FPS at around 30 and memory consumption at about 400 MB with an increasing scene scale.