A Systematic Review of Visualization in Building Information Modeling

Building Information Modeling (BIM) employs data-rich 3D CAD models for large-scale facility design, construction, and operation. These complex datasets contain a large amount and variety of information, ranging from design specifications to real-time sensor data. They are used by architects and engineers for various analysis and simulations throughout a facility's life cycle. Many techniques from different visualization fields could be used to analyze these data. However, the BIM domain still remains largely unexplored by the visualization community. The goal of this article is to encourage visualization researchers to increase their involvement with BIM. To this end, we present the results of a systematic review of visualization in current BIM practice. We use a novel taxonomy to identify main application areas and analyze commonly employed techniques. From this domain characterization, we highlight future research opportunities brought forth by the unique features of BIM. For instance, exploring the synergies between scientific and information visualization to integrate spatial and non-spatial data. We hope this article raises awareness to interesting new challenges the BIM domain brings to the visualization community

Unterstützung des Editierens von Graphen in Visuellen Repräsentationen

The goal of this thesis is to provide solutions for supporting the direct editing of graphs in visual representations for analyzing graphs. For that, a conceptual view on the user's tasks is established first. On this basis, several novel approaches to "visually edit" the different data aspects of graphs - the graph's structure and associated attribute values - are introduced. Thereby, different visual graph representations suitable for communicating the data are considered.Das Ziel der vorliegenden Dissertation ist, Lösungen zur Unterstützung des direkten Editierens von Graphen in visuellen Repräsentationen zur Analyse von Graphen bereitzustellen. Dafür wird zunächst eine konzeptuelle Sicht auf die Aufgaben des Nutzers entwickelt. Auf dieser Basis werden anschließend mehrere neue Verfahren eingeführt, welche das "visuelle Editieren" der verschiedenen Datenaspekte von Graphen - der Struktur sowie dazu assoziierte Attributwerte - ermöglichen. Dabei werden verschiedene visuelle Graphrepräsentationen berücksichtigt, welche die Daten in geeigneter Form kommunizieren

Drilling into Complex 3D Models with Gimlenses

International audienceComplex 3D virtual scenes such as CAD models of airplanes and representations of the human body are notoriously hard to visualize. Those models are made of many parts, pieces and layers of varying size, that partially occlude or even fully surround one another. We introduce Gimlenses, a multi-view, detail-in-context visualization technique that enables users to navigate complex 3D models by interactively drilling holes into their outer layers to reveal objects that are buried, possibly deep, into the scene. Those holes get constantly adjusted so as to guarantee the visibility of objects of interest from the parent view. Gimlenses can be cascaded and constrained with respect to one another, providing synchronized, complementary viewpoints on the scene. Gimlenes enable users to quickly identify elements of interest, get detailed views of those elements, relate them, and put them in a broader spatial context