Mixed reality interfaces in flood risk management

Abstract

Visualizations play a key role in analysing, understanding, and communicating risks of flooding and possible mitigation options. In particular, 3D visualizations are becoming increasingly prominent for risk communication. At the same time, there is a growing ecosystem of mixed reality interfaces that have potential to transform our interaction with 3D data and visualizations. This thesis outlines the potential of these tools and develops a set of mixed reality flood visualization prototypes that utilize capabilities of the state-of-the-art HoloLens 2 mixed reality system. By leveraging the representational and interactive capabilities provided by hand and eye-tracking, 3D displays, spatial mapping of user environment and positional tracking, these tools provide distinct and compelling experiences of 3D flood visualizations. To illuminate the potential of these tools to support meaningful practice, this thesis reflects on the user experience, hardware performance and usability of MR visualizations