Former projects

As a result of climate change, the frequency of flood events is rapidly increasing worldwide. It is therefore becoming increasingly important not only to inform the public about the risks and consequences of future flood events, but also to actively involve them and promote self-protection. Showing people how they can be affected by heavy rainfall and flooding is a great help. Up to now, 2D flood hazard maps have been used for this purpose, which provide a good overview of the basic flood hazards, but do not contain detailed information about personal damages or risks for the individual. VRVis addresses this issue with HORA 3D: As the world's first 3D flood visualization based on our flood simulation software viscloud, HORA 3D is the online tool for human-centered climate communication.

HORA 3D makes flood risk comprehensible for the whole of Austria

HORA 3D works as a browser-based cloud application integrated into hora.gv.at - Natural Hazard Overview & Risk Assessment Austria - of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Environment and Water Management. The starting point of the individual flood risk visualization is the input of a specific address, whose building and surroundings appear within seconds as an interactive 3D visualization. In this way, users can easily - and without any prior technical knowledge - find out what their personal flood risk looks like. The selectable flood areas follow the 30-, 100-, and 300-year return periods as well as the situation of the residual risk (HQ300 without dams) and include further individual factors such as the estimated damage to the own house and property, the origin of the water and the flow velocity.

HORA 3D convinces its users in particular through

• High level of detail for all of Austria, based on the high-resolution digital twin of the entire Austrian territory developed in the Hora 3.0 project, covering an area of approximately 84,000 square kilometers and a water network of 33,880 kilometers in length.
• Excellent usability, based on over a decade of Visdom software development and recently confirmed by extensive evaluation.
• Contextual visualization that uses a viewpoint-dependent focus to provide immediate intuitive understanding of the 3D visualization.
• A cloud application that is easily accessible as part of the HORA website and responds to search queries within seconds despite processing terabytes of data.
• Ideal human-centered communication tool in the field of climate change adaptation and risk communication, contributing significantly to awareness and sensitization.