Publication List

The Research Cluster "Smart Communities and Technologies" (Smart CT) at TU Wien will provide the scientific underpinnings for next-generation complex smart city and communities infrastructures. Cities are ever-evolving, complex cyber physical systems of systems covering a magnitude of different areas. The initial concept of smart cities and communities started with cities utilizing communication technologies to deliver services to their citizens and evolved to using information technology to be smarter and more efficient about the utilization of their resources. In recent years however, information technology has changed significantly, and with it the resources and areas addressable by a smart city have broadened considerably. They now cover areas like smart buildings, smart products and production, smart traffic systems and roads, autonomous driving, smart grids for managing energy hubs and electric car utilization or urban environmental systems research.

3D spatialization creates the link between the internet of cities infrastructure and the actual 3D world in which a city is embedded in order to perform advanced computation and visualization tasks. Sensors, actuators and users are embedded in a complex 3D environment that is constantly changing. Acquiring, modeling and visualizing this dynamic 3D environment are the challenges we need to face using methods from Visual Computing and Computer Graphics. 3D Spatialization aims to make a city aware of its 3D environment, allowing it to perform spatial reasoning to solve problems like visibility, accessibility, lighting, and energy efficiency.

This is a joint project with the civil engineering faculty and several companies. Its aim is the development of an Integrated Framework “Housing 4.0”; a digital platform supporting integrated planning and project delivery through coupling various digital tools and databases, like Building Information Modeling (BIM) for Design to Production  and Parametric Habitat Designer.

Our goal is to exploit the potential of BIM for modular, off-site housing assembly in order to improve planning and construction processes, reduce cost and construction time and allow for mass customization will be explored.

The novel approach in this project is user-involvement; which has been neglected in recent national and international projects on off-site, modular construction supported by digital technologies. A parametric design tool should allow different stakeholders to explore both high-level and low-level options and their impact on the construction project so that mutually optimal solutions can be found easier.

Visibility culling is a fundamental problem of computer graphics, and is of crucial importance for many applications, like game development or architectural design. For example, interactively rendering a model containing hundreds of millions of polygons like the Boeing 777 model shown on the cover page is only possible when invisible parts of the model are "culled" away. Solving the visibility problem has been an important research topic for many years, and countless methods have been proposed. Amazingly, most approaches still have more or less serious issues that prevent their widespread use. Preprocessed visibility solutions attempt to solve the problem in an offline step, but are often slow, lack robustness, and are hard to implement. Online culling algorithms have a lot of potential since they can be used on arbitrary scenes, but they induce an overhead during rendering which is unacceptable for applications that strive for optimal performance. We believe that basic research problems remain unsolved until this day for preprocessed visibility as well as for online culling, and the goal of this project is to tackle and solve the majority of these problems. In order to do this, we have to gain more insight into the complex properties of visibility, which are still not entirely understood. Our proposed methods have applications in various fields, like game development, architectural design, urban visualization, or massive model visualization.