Making the Invisible Visible—Strategies for Visualizing Underground Infrastructures in Immersive Environments

Visualization of underground infrastructure in an interactive 3D immersive environment is extremely important for efficient management of city’s infrastructure. This paper describes different geometric modelling approaches to illustrate appropriate visualization of such data. A multimodal prototype has been developed by exploiting different algorithms to render these invisible underground objects as part of an urban model. This prototype has been integrated in an immersive geographic information system (GIS), named MultiVis, for handheld iOS and Android devices. As a part of the study, three distinct strategies have been tested; the first is based on the use of transparencies to convey a sense of depth, the second relies on an image-space superposition of “ditches” on top of the rendered frame and the third is a world-space deformation of the elevation model that exposes the underground elements. Furthermore, a comparative user experience analysis of different techniques aimed to the geometrically accurate visualisation of utility networks and other underground facilities are performed and evaluated. It includes a set of user evaluations for different parameters of these techniques, which gives us an insight on how the proposed methods affect the experience and usability for technical and non-technical users.