An indoor thermal environment design system for renovation using augmented reality

Abstract The renovation projects of buildings and living spaces, which aim to improve the thermal environment, are gaining importance because of energy saving effects and occupants' health considerations. However, the indoor thermal design is not usually performed in a very efficient manner by stakeholders, due to the limitations of a sequential waterfall design process model, and due to the difficulty in comprehending the CFD simulation results for stakeholders. On the other hand, indoor greenery has been introduced to buildings as a method for adjusting the thermal condition. Creating a VR environment, which can realistically and intuitively visualize a thermal simulation model is very time consuming and the resulting VR environment created by 3D computer graphics objects is disconnected from the reality and does not allow design stakeholders to experience the feelings of the real world. Therefore, the objective of this research is to develop a new AR-based methodology for intuitively visualizing indoor thermal environment for building renovation projects. In our proposed system, easy-to-comprehend visualization of CFD results augment the real scenes to provide users with information about thermal effects of their renovation design alternatives interactively. Case studies to assess the effect of indoor greenery alternatives on the thermal environment are performed. In conclusion, integrating CFD and AR provides users with a more natural feeling of the future thermal environment. The proposed method was evaluated feasible and effective.