Interactive Simulation of Architecture in Virtual Environments

Abstract

Architecture always has an environmental impact. By using simulations, planners can minimize the environmental impact. Since simulations normally take a long time and thus only allow a very limited number of iterations, our project describes the setup of a close-to-real-time simulation technique. By dividing the simulation into smaller parts and running the software on clusters or massively parallel computing platforms, first results are available within several seconds, reasonable results below one minute. In order to make this tool easily accessible to specialists and laymen, a tangible user interface provides an intuitive interaction method. The results of the simulation can be visualized and interacted with in different virtual environments. Limitations, mainly automatic grid generation, shape recognition and computation power are discussed