While sailing, sailors solely rely on their eyes to inspect the sail shape and adjust the sail configurations to achieve an appropriate sail shape that corresponds to the weather condition. This so-called trimming process requires years of experience. Hence the visual inspection of sail shape suffers from inaccuracy and communication difficulties. Therefore, this research proposes a visual analysis tool that presents an accurate sail shape structure and supports sailors in investigating the optimal sail shape of certain weather conditions. In order to achieve our goals, we reconstruct the sail shape using two triangulation methods. For incomplete reconstructed sail shapes caused by the uncertain image quality, we deform a complete template sail under the constraints of the incomplete sail shape and use the deformed sail as an estimation of the proper shape structure. We designed a visualization dashboard for sailors to explore the 3D structure, 2D profiles and characteristics of the time-varying sail shape and analyze their relation to boat speed. The usability of the visualization tool is tested by a qualitative evaluation with two sailing experts. The result shows that the reconstruction and deformation of sail shape are valid, and the visualization dashboard has the potential to enhance sailors' comprehension of sail shape and provide insights into the optimal sail shape trimming.

While sailing, sailors rely on their eyes to inspect the sail shape and adjust the configurations to achieve an appropriate shape for a certain the weather condition. Mastering this so-called trimming process requires years of experience since the visual inspection of the sail shape suffers from inaccuracies and many times are difficult to communicate verbally. Therefore, this research proposes a visual analysis tool that presents an accurate sail shape representation and supports sailors in investigating the optimal sail shape for certain weather conditions. In order to achieve our goals, we reconstruct the 3D sail shape from point clouds acquired by photogrammetry methods. For incomplete acquisitions we deform a complete template sail to estimate the missing parts. We designed a visualization dashboard for sailors to explore the 3D structure, 2D profiles and characteristics of the time-varying sail shape as well as analyze their relation to boat speed. The usability of the visualization tool is tested through a qualitative evaluation with two sailing experts. The result shows that the reconstruction and deformation of sail shape are plausible. Furthermore, the visualization dashboard has the potential to enhance sailors’ comprehension of sail shape and provide insights towards optimal trimming.