Bio-inspired Cutaway Visualization for Voxel-based Urban Digital Twins

Abstract. Ongoing urbanization has driven the development of Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) as virtual replicas of cities integrating heterogeneous data sources. While voxel-based UDTs have emerged as a promising framework for real-time applications, dense urban environments remain prone to visual clutter and occlusions, necessitating specialized visualization techniques such as cutaway approaches in order to guide the focus of the users.
Drawing inspiration from the avian visual system, this paper proposes a bio-inspired cutaway visualization for voxel-based urban environments integrating multiple visual features, including varying LOD, color contrast, transparency halo, dark tint, and magnification, to enhance focus object observation. The cutaway was evaluated through a user survey with 23 participants.
Although the bio-inspired cutaway outperformed the standard cutaway technique without additional visual variables, the average rating of 3.66 on a 5-point Likert scale (where 1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree) suggests that the approach has potential for further refinement. Future work will optimize the current visual features, explore additional visual variables, and investigate alternative interactive scenarios alongside larger-scale user studies.