Billie. A prototypical framework for building information model visualization

Abstract

Current software applications for Building Information Modelling provide only limited possibilities to create customized visual representations of designed buildings and planned constructions. With reusable and exchangeable visualization configurations, customized domain- and task-specific visual representations could be generated for given building information. This concept is demonstrated with a prototypical implementation: Billie is a proof-of-concept framework written in Java that accepts building information together with a visualization specification and produces scene graphs for the customized visualization of the given building information. To achieve configurability, Billie provides abstract classes as extension points to implement new BIM input data accessors, new configurations for generating the visualizations, and new scene graph types as visualization targets. With a domain specific language, the configurations become independent of their runtime environment and can be passed between different software applications. The software can be reused for research on new visualization methods in architecture, engineering, and construction or as a supporting visualization tool for research on other topics in the area.