Interactive, immersive visualization for indoor environments: use of augmented reality, human-computer interaction and building simulation

We present an interactive gesture recognition-based, immersive augmented reality system visualizing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) datasets of indoor environments. CFD simulation is used to predict the indoor environments and assess their response to specific internal and external conditions. To enable efficient visualization of CFD datasets in actual-space, an augmented reality system was integrated with a CFD simulation engine. To facilitate efficient data manipulation of the simulated post-processed CFD data and to increase the user-control of the immersive environment, a new intuitive method of human-computer interaction (HCI) has been incorporated. A gesture recognition system was integrated with the augmented reality-CFD structure to transform hand-postural data into a general description of hand-shape, through forward kinematics and computation of hand segment positions and their joint angles. This enabled real-time interactions between users and simulated CFD results in actual-space.