Developing Efficient Mechanisms for BIM-to-AR/VR Data Transfer

Augmented reality/virtual reality (AR/VR) has been increasingly adopted to enhance the visualization of building information modeling (BIM) models. However, there is a lack of mechanisms for efficient data transfer from BIM to AR/VR. On the one hand, most semantic information is lost while importing models from BIM into AR/VR engines. On the other hand, huge and complex models can increase the time for model transfer, increase the computation workload while rendering, and reduce fluency when using AR/VR applications. Therefore, this paper aims to develop efficient mechanisms for BIM-to-AR/VR data transfer to better utilize the information of BIM. In this paper, an ontology-based approach is proposed to transfer semantic information of BIM. Building components in geometric models are classified according to their features and simplified with different polygon reduction methods. As shown in the experimental validation, the proposed mechanisms have the capability to efficiently transfer semantic information of BIM to AR/VR, greatly reduce the number of triangles for geometric models while maximizing the consistency of the overall shape, and improve the frame rate in corresponding AR/VR applications.