HoloCity – exploring the use of augmented reality cityscapes for collaborative understanding of high-volume urban sensor data

Abstract

This research presents an application for visualizing the real-world cityscapes and massive transport network performance data sets in Augmented Reality (AR) using the Microsoft HoloLens, or any equivalent hardware. This runs in tandem with numerous emerging applications in the growing worldwide Smart Cities movement and industry. Specifically, this application seeks to address visualization of both real-time and aggregated city data feeds - such as weather, traffic and social media feeds. The software is developed in extensible ways, and it able to overlay various historic and live data sets coming from multiple sources. Advances in computer graphics, data processing and visualization now allow us to tie these visual tools in with much more detailed, longitudinal, massive performance data sets to support comprehensive and useful forms of visual analytics for city planners, decision makers and citizens. Further, it allows us to show these in new interfaces such as the HoloLens and other head-mounted displays to enable collaboration and more natural mappings with the real world. Using this toolkit, this visualization technology allows a novel approach to explore hundreds of millions of data points in order to find insights, trends, patterns over significant periods of time and geographic space. The focus of our development uses open data sets, which maximizes applications to assessing the performance of networks of cities worldwide. The city of Sydney, Australia is used as our initial application. It showcases a real-world example of this application enabling analysis of the transport network performance over the past twelve months.