Integrating Animated Computational Fluid Dynamics into Mixed Reality for Building-Renovation Design

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

This research presents a very innovative approach for performing building renovation, making it more user friendly and intuitive. The manuscript, which is well structured, has been prepared with sufficient review, methodology and discussions.  

There are some grammatical errors that need to be corrected. Please see the attached for some highlighted examples.  

However, I am wondering if building renovation is the most precise term in this case considering the limited applications of this method and building renovation is much more than what was presented. Just some food for thought. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

We wish to express our appreciation to the reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped us significantly improve the paper.

Point 1: There are some grammatical errors that need to be corrected. Please see the attached for some highlighted examples. 

Response 1: Thank you for your concern about the grammatical errors and I am sorry for my carelessness. As a result, all grammatical errors had been fixed, and the manuscript has been checked again.

Point 2: I am wondering if building renovation is the most precise term, in this case, considering the limited applications of this method and building renovation is much more than what was presented.

Response 2: Although the prototype of this manuscript is used for the renovation project of indoor thermal environment, the proposed method can also be used in other targets of building renovation, allowing different designs to be easy-to-comprehend. Therefore, as future tasks, we also hope that this proposal can be used to show the results of seismic performance, facility improvement, facade renovation, and building repair. Make all designs easy-to-understand and easy-to-comprehend.

Therefore, the beginning part of discussion and conclusion were changed to: “The indoor thermal environment, which is an important part of the building renovation, is selected as the target of this verification…”(Line 484–493), “This research proposed a new methodology to support building renovation design by integrating CFD analysis and MR technology…” (Line 528­­–531), and “As a future work, the proposed method will be introduced into other targets of building renovation design…” (Line 540–545).

To show that the proposed method is for building renovation, the indoor thermal environment is verified as part of it.

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The attachment is the same as above

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is a very interesting study and a timely topic for research, integrating animated Computational Fluid Dynamics into Mixed Reality for building renovation design, enabling the simultaneous designing of the building plan and thermal environment during a renovation process. Although the authors have demonstrated great efforts with such an important study, the results should discuss the validation and limitations of the research conducted as well as the methods used. While the visualisation of the results is the main concern, it is as important that the accuracy of the results is checked, and therefore the validation should also be discussed in this paper. Otherwise, the authors should state the full limitations by including the importance of such validation process when it comes to evaluating the results. Overall, the study is relevant to the special issue on Computer-Aided Architectural Design and would be very interesting to the readers working in the related field, and the conclusions derived from the study are also offering some useful findings. I do not have any further comments or suggestions for further improvement of this paper.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

We wish to express our appreciation to the reviewers for their insightful comments, which helped us significantly improve the paper.

Point 1: Although the authors have demonstrated great efforts with such an important study, the results should discuss the validation and limitations of the research conducted as well as the methods used.

Response 1: Thanks for pointing out, indeed this article mainly describes the visual results of the test, and the results and shortcomings verified by the test are insufficiently discussed. So I added in discussion and conclusion.

“To visualize indoor temperature and airflow using the HMD-HoloLens, the visualization of the results in HoloLens showed that the proposal is feasible for indoor thermal environmental design analysis during the building design process…”(Line 486–492)

Point 2: While the visualisation of the results is the main concern, it is as important that the accuracy of the results is checked, and therefore the validation should also be discussed in this paper. Otherwise, the authors should state the full limitations by including the importance of such validation process when it comes to evaluating the results.

Response 2: In order to ensure that the CFD numerical results can accurately represent the real world status, a measurement experiment was performed, which is described in Chapter 4.4. For the accuracy of visualization results, because the registration method is SLAM-based and its accuracy based on the environment scan data of the RGB-D camera, the accuracy will increase with the richness of the scan data. Therefore, this study shows viewers that there is no inaccuracy or incongruent in registration by displaying many images. Nevertheless, there is indeed a lack of discussion beyond the images, which was supplemented at the end of discussion. “The registration accuracy of the SLAM-based MR was verified by measuring the location of two anchor cubes at a distance of 5 meters in the real world and compared it with the model in virtual world… As a result, after three scans of the surrounding environment, the average of the error is 5mm” (Line 511–515)

In the meanwhile, the discussion of validation was added. “In this research project, we proposed 3 renovation plans to improve the indoor environment of the target room. During the experience, observers quickly understood the indoor thermal environment information brought by the animated CFD visualization results. And it is easy to visually feel the difference brought by the three plans. This proves that this proposal is really helpful for non-professionals to quickly understand and compare different renovation designs.” (Line 498–503)

In addition to technical limitations, the limitations of the research objectives were also discussed. Although the prototype of this manuscript is limited to the renovation project of indoor thermal environment, the proposed method can also be used in other targets of building renovation, allowing different designs to be easy-to-comprehend. “As a future work, the proposed method will be introduced into other targets of building renovation design…” (Line 540­­–545).

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The attachment is the same as above

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The revision completed is satisfactory, which has now significantly improved the paper, presenting an innovative material on the subject, and therefore I would like to thank the authors for their contribution.