Earthquakes are low-frequency, high-impact natural disasters that require public preparedness to reduce associated risks. Virtual reality (VR) technology has been implemented in recent studies to create virtual earthquake scenes and explore its potential application in earthquake drills and evacuation training. However, most existing VR-enabled earthquake scenarios were developed with a focus on the building motion and damage to a building’s contents and nonstructural members instead structural deformation and damage, which limits fidelity and effectiveness. This paper presents an innovative method for physics-based simulating and visualizing earthquake-induced concrete damage in reinforced concrete frame members via a newly developed object-oriented program: Vivid Concrete. Vivid Concrete is a middleware between finite-element analysis programs and VR and game engines that streamline the postprocessing of nonlinear response history analysis results and the data preprocessing for VR-based immersive visualization. Instead of solely relying on the member geometry in conventional building information modeling (BIM), Vivid Concrete also integrates simulated concrete cracks and spalling to create surface meshes of frame members. This paper validates the feasibility of Vivid Concrete for visualizing high-fidelity earthquake-induced concrete damage and the structural response of concrete structures with three examples: (1) a reinforced concrete column subassembly test, (2) a full-size bridge column shake table test, and (3) a five-story concrete structure shake table test. The results show consistency among experiments, simulations, and visualization effects in terms of structural member deformation time history, temporal progression, and spatial patterns of concrete cracking and spalling.
Zhong et al. (Sat,) studied this question.