CAVE-VR and Unity Game Engine for Visualizing City Scale 3D Meshes

Calvin Davis, Jaired Collins, Joshua Fraser, Haoxiang Zhang, Shizeng Yao, Emily Lattanzio, Bimal Balakrishnan, Ye Duan, Prasad Calyam, Kannappan Palaniappan

Abstract: Modeling and simulation of large urban regions is beneficial for a range of applications including intelligent transportation, smart cities, infrastructure planning, and training artificial intelligence for autonomous navigation systems including ground vehicles and aerial drones. Immersive environments including virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), mixed reality (MR or XR) can be used to explore city scale regions for planning, design, training and operations. Virtual environments are in the midst of rapid change as innovations in display tech-nologies, graphics processors and game engine software present new opportunities for incorporating modeling and simulation into engineering workflows. Game engine software like Unity with photorealistic rendering and realistic physics have plug-in support for a variety of virtual environments. In this paper, we explore the visualization of urban scale real world accurate meshes in virtual environments, including the Microsoft HoloLens head mounted display or the CAVE VR for multi-user interaction.