The effects of three environmental factors on building evacuation time

Building fires can be considered a risk to the health and safety of occupants. Environmental factors in building fires might affect the speed of an evacuation. Therefore, in this study participants (N = 153) were tested in an experimental design for the effects of (1) a fire alarm, (2) darkness and (3) the use of emergency exit signs on...

Circular economy visibility evaluation framework

Sustainability is high on the agendas of public and private organizations. Governments are setting targets for reducing the use of virgin raw materials in products and to eliminate waste. To accelerate the transition towards a Circular Economy (CE) policymakers are launching instruments. However, policy instruments, such as financial incentives...

Extended Data Pipeline for Circular Economy Monitoring

Circular economy (CE) and sustainability are high on the political agenda of governments nationally and internationally. Governments are developing instruments to stimulate the CE, but without monitoring in place, these measures can be subject to abuse, failing to achieve the desired effects. CE monitoring, however, is still a nascent topic in...

Orientation and Wayfinding: Measuring Visibility

In this chapter, we explain how the analytical logic of space syntax is applied for visibility analysis. In the previous chapter, the focus was on presenting all public spaces as axial sightlines. The individual axial line is a one-dimensional (1D) representation of public space and is useful for analysing the interrelationship of public spaces...

Conservative Ray Batching using Geometry Proxies

We present a method for improving batched ray traversal as was presented by Pharr et al. [PKGH97]. We propose to use conservative proxy geometry to more accurately determine whether a ray has a possibility of hitting any geometry that is stored<br/>on disk. This prevents unnecessary disk loads and thus reduces the disk bandwidth.

Next Event Estimation++: Visibility Mapping for Efficient Light Transport Simulation

Monte-Carlo rendering requires determining the visibility between scene points as the most common and compute intense operation to establish paths between camera and light source. Unfortunately, many tests reveal occlusions and the corresponding paths do not contribute to the final image. In this work, we present next event estimation++ (NEE++):...

A methodical quantification of needle visibility and echogenicity in ultrasound images

During ultrasound-guided percutaneous interventions, needle localization can be a challenge. To increase needle visibility, enhancements of both the imaging methods and the needle surface properties have been investigated. However, a methodical approach to compare potential solutions is currently unavailable. The work described here involves...

Compliant joint echogenicity in ultrasound images: towards highly visible steerable needles

Radio frequency ablation is commonly used in the treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma. Clinicians rely on imaging techniques, such as medical ultrasound, to confirm an accurate needle placement. This accuracy may improve by means of active needle steering techniques, which are currently in development. Needle steering will likely increase the...

MegaViews: Scalable Many-View Rendering With Concurrent Scene-View Hierarchy Traversal

We present a scalable solution to render complex scenes from a large amount of viewpoints. While previous approaches rely either on a scene or a view hierarchy to process multiple elements together, we make full use of both, enabling sublinear performance in terms of views and scene complexity. By concurrently traversing the hierarchies, we...

The effect of visual information on the manual approach and landing

The visual scene is an important source of information for the manual approach and landing task. This study deals with the effect of this information in combination with basic display information on the manual approach performance. In this context, a pre-experimental theoretical analysis has been performed in terms of the optimal control model....