Virtual reality web application for automotive data visualization

Abstract

Nowadays, the automotive industry is one of the largest and continuously ongoing economic sectors in the world. Countless companies need and look for autonomous driving data to learn and test when creating new motor vehicles. Autonomous driving will play a big role in the future, and we can help continue its constant growth with with data visualization applications that display results of automotive experiments. Currently, there's an application in Altran, to visualize autonomous driving data online using WebGL. However, the showcasing of the elements and the sequence in 3D is confusing and not comprehensible enough, like it would be while using virtual reality. This happens as a result of the elements being displayed as lines according to their distance between the objects and the ground, instead of their real shapes. Since the data infrastructure can contain an abundant size of elements, like point-clouds and trajectories, the visualization of this data will be displayed more efficaciously, using virtual reality techniques. This will also complement the current large variety of tools concerning automotive demonstration in Altran, contributing to related public presentations in the company. To strengthen this 3D data visualization, this project aims to create a VR application that displays autonomous driving data. The compatibility between WebGL and WebXR will be tested, and in case this proves successful, the current structure of the application mentioned above will be reused. Besides being able to show the necessary automotive data, this new virtual reality structure, should maintain the functionalities of the WebGL application and contain extra features, like supporting different types of point-clouds and loading data from multiple sources. The usability of the Virtual Reality devices and its performance will also be evaluated, as well a comparison between the WebGL application.