buildingSmart International Awards 2018, Special Special Award

Award summary
The award program hosted by buildingSMART aims to recognise exemplary projects using buildingSMART standards and methodologies. Utilising one or more of the buildingSMART tools or standards entrants demonstrate innovative and practical applications to challenges in interoperability.

‘It’s an opportunity for companies to showcase their application of buildingSMART open standard solutions to current challenges of interoperability faced during collaborative project delivery or asset operations’. Richard Petrie, Chief Executive (buildingSMART)

Project Summary

Aerith is a proof of concept audiovisual query engine for the openBIM IFC standard data exchange format which combines audio querying with previous research by Strathclyde university into game engine integration and virtual photogrammetry. Integrated with the Unity game engine, she provides peripheral-free interaction with the building model which will enable future development in safer VR/AR usage. Aerith’s secondary objective is to introduce increased human-computer information bandwith through heightened social presence.

Aerith seemed like the natural progression for the department’s research. We integrated the IFC file format with the Unity game engine enabling interoperability with traditional CAD platforms and virtual photogrammetry with entity identification opening visibility-driven querying, audio querying felt like the perfect complement to the latter and a novel use of the former.

It is envisaged that the concept will lead the way for safer interaction with immersive and semi-immersive environments and introduce deeper social presence improving the user’s capacity to learn from environmental feedback.