Development

The main aspect of this section is to describe the delopment process of the SensorRAUM project. There were no concrete specifications what and how the visualization should be implemented. One approach was to visualize temperature data to detect thermal bridges within buildings another approach was to visualize the brightness of light in specific locations to see if e.g. an office room is empty. For the demonstrator we decided to choose the first option, visualizing temperature values.

We envisioned an office building based on pictures from SAP buildings which was modelled with 3ds Max. Based on this model we built an architecture prototype and attached mPart sensor nodes to collect temperature values. The temperature is now visualized within the SensorRAUM 3D environment.

Envisioning a building

There were no specifications for a building thus we designed a building which is close to buildings from SAP.

From this pictures we created a 3D modell which would suit the application and would have enough rooms for visualizing temperature differences.

Creating the prototype

Once the 3D modell was created we began with the the building of the prototype.The basement is made from chipboards and the outer casing and the arch inside the prototype are made of Plexiglas. The sawn out holes in the ground match exactly the shape of the mParts from Particle Computer. This way we could hide some parts of the rather big sensor nodes with their dimension of 8x8x4cm.

Implementing the 3d virtual SenorRAUM environment

Once the 3d model of the building was created it could be directly imported into the Croquet environment. To visualize the sensor data a complete reference implementation of the libParticle was integrated in the Croquet framework to be able to interact with the sensor nodes.

Recent Changes and new Features

In the latest version of SensorRaum we implemented a floating chart panel which visualizes historic sensor data as line charts. It is directly integrated in the 3D world an an avatar can interact with it (e.g. turn it or move it around). The chart displays all available sensor information (e.g. light and temperature) within a predefined timeframe. It can also be attached to the avatar thus having the sensor information available at all times regardless in which room he is located. The last row of the pictures shows how an avatar attaches a chart and moves around with it towards the lobby.

Virtual Tour

A video preview of SensorRAUM is available in the download area for a live impression of the 3d visualization framework.

How to get the SensorRAUM environment

Please proceed to the download area where you can download binary and source releases of the SensorRAUM environment. But at the moment there are no plans to have a public release.