A game engine based application for visualising and analysing environmental spatiotemporal mobile sensor data in an urban context

Abstract

Climate change and the high proportion of private motorised transport leads to a high exposure of the urban population to environmental stressors such as particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, noise, and heat. The few fixed measuring stations for these stressors do not provide information on how they are distributed throughout the urban area and what influence the local urban structure has on hot and cold spots of pollution. In the measurement campaign “UmweltTracker” with 95 participants (cyclists, pedestrians), data on the stressors were collected via mobile sensors. The aim was to design and implement an application to analyse the heterogeneous data sets. In this paper we present a prototype of a visualisation and analysis application based on the Unity Game Engine, which allowed us to explore and analyse the collected data sets and to present them on a PC as well as in a VR environment. With the application we were able to show the influence of local urban structures as well as the impact of the time of day on the measured values. With the help of the application, outliers could be identified and the underlying causes could be investigated. The application was used in analysis sessions as well as a workshop with stakeholders.