SailVis: Reconstruction and Multifaceted Visualization of Sail Shape

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.

@InProceedings { MPBM21,
  author       = "Mu, Danfeng and Pieras, Marcos and Broekens, Douwe and Marroquim, Ricardo",
  title        = "SailVis: Reconstruction and Multifaceted Visualization of Sail Shape",
  booktitle    = "EuroVis - Short Papers",
  year         = "2021",
  doi          = "https://doi.org/10.2312/evs.20211049",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2021/MPBM21"
}