Combined Web-Based Visualisation of 3D Point Clouds and Acoustic Descriptors: An Interdisciplinary Challenge

This paper presents an online application—called 3D integrator—enabling visual cross-examinations of architectural and acoustic data on web browsers and explains the rationale behind its development. The tool consists of a series of overlays developed over the Potree 3D point cloud renderer. It is used to display visually, in an interactive environment, the 3D point clouds resulting from a survey protocol tailored to the specific needs of the corpus under scrutiny—15 small-scale edifices often referred to as “minor heritage assets”—and to the research’s overall ambition, reasoning on architectural and acoustic features at an interdisciplinary level. One of the tool’s distinctive features is to project abstract information (acoustic descriptors) in a “close to real” 3D space (point clouds), hence merging scientific visualisation and information visualisation practices. The paper first shortly sums up the particularities of the survey protocol and discusses the implementation of the analytical add-ons that have been introduced (visual trace of the survey protocol itself, volume calculation, and exploratory 3D representation of acoustic descriptors). It then focuses on use cases that illustrate what the approach helps to observe concerning the interiors of edifices when capturing and co-examining dimensional and acoustic features.