Virtual-SAP: an immersive tool for visualizing the response of building structures to environmental conditions

Author

Bowman, Doug A. ; Setareh, Mehdi ; Pinho, Marcio S. ; Ali, Ndiwalana ; Kalita, Alex ; Lee, Yunha ; Lucas, John ; Gracey, Matthew ; Kothapalli, Malini ; Zhu, Qinwei ; Datey, Ameya ; Tumati, Pradeep

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Virginia Tech., VA, USA

fYear

2003

fDate

22-26 March 2003

Firstpage

243

Lastpage

250

Abstract

Immersive virtual environments (VEs) offer interactive, real-time visualization capabilities for engineers, architects, and scientists. This paper presents Virtual-SAP, an immersive VE application allowing users to assess building structures and their response to various environmental conditions through an interactive design-build-test-redesign cycle. Virtual-SAP has three distinct user interfaces that support its use with a high-end, multi-tracker VE system, with a low-cost portable VE system, or on the desktop. Two of these interfaces have been proven highly usable in user testing, and the third will be tested soon. Virtual-SAP is being used for both research and education.

Keywords

civil engineering computing; data visualisation; human factors; real-time systems; user interfaces; virtual reality; Virtual-SAP; building structures; design-build-test-redesign cycle; environmental conditions; immersive virtual environments; interactive real-time visualization; user interfaces; user testing; Buildings; Computer architecture; Computer graphics; Computer science; Computer science education; Data visualization; Layout; Testing; User interfaces; Virtual environment;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Virtual Reality, 2003. Proceedings. IEEE

ISSN

1087-8270

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1882-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/VR.2003.1191146

Filename

1191146