New Realities for Canada’s Parliament: A Workflow for Preparing Heritage Bim for Game Engines and Virtual Reality

Abstract

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> With a growing interest in the use of virtual reality (VR) for dissemination of cultural heritage sites, the question of how to leverage existing documentation as content for virtual experiences becomes a potentially valuable opportunity. Notably, as sites are increasingly documented with building information modelling (BIM) for the purposes of conservation, there is potential to give these models a second life as content for public education and promotion. However, although software exist for viewing BIM in VR headsets, they are inadequate for complex models typical of heritage buildings, and lack functionality for integrating custom didactic content and storytelling. To make BIM performative in VR and allow for custom content, a workflow was developed to translate BIM into game engine scenes — which optimizes geometry following performance guidelines of VR while maintaining the high visual fidelity of the BIM. As a case study, six heritage spaces of the Centre Block of the Canadian Parliament which had been previously documented and modelled by CIMS were prepared for Unity3D, enabling their later use in a storytelling experience.</p>

HBIM for the preservation of a historic infrastructure: the Carlo III bridge of the Carolino Aqueduct

“…The same advantages motivate the growing interest in applying the BIM methodology to various aspects of Cultural Heritage management, both for restoration and museum management (Tucci et al 2019a), or for communication projects also with XR tools (Brioso et al 2019;Pybus et al 2019).…”

Human–Computer Interaction Based on Scan-to-BIM Models, Digital Photogrammetry, Visual Programming Language and eXtended Reality (XR)

“…On the other hand, AR is the representation of an altered reality in which virtual/artificial sensory information is superimposed on the ordinary reality perceived through our senses [41]. It is a perceptual enhancement, fundamentally based on the generation of virtual contents by a computer and their superimposition with reality [42].…”

HBIM, 3D drawing and virtual reality for archaeological sites and ancient ruins

“…In particular, Brumana et al, 2019, propose a reference scale, able to relate to the various scales of representation for the HBIM mode. This previous study shows how the LOD of a doublecurved masonry with a variable section can be represented digitally in different ways, adapting as much as possible to the design requirements and different types of analysis such as the finite element analysis (FEA) (Barazzetti et al, 2016, Quattrini et al, 2019 material and surface analysis (Reina Ortiz et al, 2019), storage of stratigraphic units (Chiabrando et al, 2017), sharing of information via cloud and database (Cogima et al, 2019) and finally VR-AR (Bolognesi & Aiello, 2019;Pybus et al, 2019;Rua & Alvito, 2011).…”