Solar energy is an important renewable energy source that is already generated by millions of solar panels attached to building roofs throughout The Netherlands. Whether a roof is suitablefor solar panels relies on its type, orientation and whether it is put in shadow by a neighbouring object. This means, the higher the solar potential of a roof, the better.

A solar radiation model is used to determine the solar potential of a roof. Well-known Geographical Information Systems, such as ArcGIS and GRASS GIS provide solar radiation models for raster data. However, raster data does not model the 3D urban environment accurate enough. Vector data is better capable of representing 3D buildings models, but solar radiation models for vector data are not widespread available and are computationally inefficient, because of the shadow casting step.

This research aims at providing an efficient solar radiation model for processing large-scale 3D city models. The 3D BAG data set, containing all the buildings in The Netherlands as vector data, is taken as use case. Their building models are stored in CityJSON format, subdivided into smaller tiles based on the spatial extent. The implemented model in this research, called SolarBAG, takes one or multiple tiles as input, processes the building geometries to compute the solar potential, and outputs an enriched CityJSON file where each building roof consists of yearly solar potential values. Within the process, the building geometries are stored in an Rtree to allow fast retrieval when filtering neighbouring buildings that potentially cast a shadow over another building. The roofs of buildings are sampled into a grid of points to account for the variable solar radiation values on a roof surface caused by shadows of neighbouring buildings. A ray-box intersection method is used to find the neighbouring buildings casting a shadow on another building.

To assess the quality and scalability of the implemented solar radiation method, experiments are conducted. For the quality assessment, the solarpy module used to compute the beam solar radiation, is compared to ground truth values, and the solar radiation model is compared to the solar radiation tool in ArcGIS. For the scalability assessment, the solar radiation model is tested for an increasing number of tiles. Based on the assessments, it can be concluded that the implemented solar radiation model can successfully enrich building roofs with solar potential values for one or multiple CityJSON files. However, there are still some bugs and inconsistencies present in the solar radiation model, and performance gains could still be achieved by neighbour filtering improvements. ... Read more

The Deployment of Indoor Point Clouds for Firefighting Strategy project was realised as a Synthesis Project of the Geomatics Master Programme of the Built Environment Faculty at the Technical University of Delft. This project was executed by a team of five Master students in collaboration with the Dutch response team collective Veiligheidsregio Rotterdam-Rijnmond. The objective of this project is to develop an information system that makes use of indoor data to support tactical decision-making during fire emergency responses. The main challenge that response teams are facing when they develop deployment plans is the lack of appropriate information about indoor spaces. As a result, response teams may end up relying on inaccurate assumptions which can lead to dangerous situations. New technologies such as SLAM devices and augmented reality displays, combined with processing techniques, can be used to supply them with the information needed to make the right choices. The result of this project is a prototypical information system containing an interactive, 3D environment that can receive updates, merge data from different data sources, and accommodate mixed reality information sharing in real-time. ... Read more

Escape rooms are multi-player games that contain several puzzles that need to be solved in order to open locked chests and discover new clues, which eventually enables the players to escape the room. While the players are inside the escape room, the game host observes the group through live cameras. When players tend to fail to make it out of the escape room in time, the host needs to give them hints to keep them on track. Popup-escape is a company that designs escape rooms. They have asked us to develop an application that supports the game host in the process of observing escape rooms. Hence, we developed an application that displays live video streams and shows valuable information about the progress of the game. The game host can configure the escape room in the application before players enter the escape room. This configuration sets up how the escape room is structured. The game host indicates the number of chests (key points in the game) that need to be unlocked and the time it should take players to open it. The application then processes the incoming video streams and detects chests that have been opened, as well as the level of current activity. The progress is measured against time. When the progress made is falling short compared to the preconfigured time limits, the host gets a warning, alerting him that the players in the escape room need a hint in order to be able to finish the game in time. ... Read more