A few years ago Jon Morgan, our Building Physics leader in Australasia, made the following slide to illustrate just how many different software analysis tools his team uses on a regular basis. When you multiply that across all the services a firm like ours offers that is a lot of software.

Specialists need specialist tools and sometimes software doesn’t cut it. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has its place but it isn’t about to replace wind tunnel testing. DesignLink, which is open via a collaboration agreement, is one of the ways we address how to shift and manage data across projects.

With all this in mind, we have created Submerge to visualise multiple analysis results that are generated on projects in the one space. Large multi-disciplinary projects create huge datasets and we have been expending research and development effort to combine this data and create richer spaces for design navigation. The aim with so many disciplines is to clearly tell the story of an emergent design and Submerge is a data visualization tool that integrates the datasets into one 3D environment, providing an immersive and interactive presentation experience.

Above: Geometry and CFD analysis

Rather than presenting images from various analysis tools, we can now walk through the design with people and cars moving, or with the wind blowing as predicted by separate analysis programs.

The above image shows geometry (from Rhino via Grasshopper), wind streamlines (from CFD), structural analysis (from GSA) and Pedestrian analysis (from MassMotion) in the one 3D environment.

We have made it possible to publish the content so others can wander through in their own time and on their own computer. There is more work to do in 2012 with navigation, testing physical spaces for Submerge projection – our SoundLabs would be great – and playing with more controllers like the  Kinect. All good fun and its been nice to see client reaction to Submerge over the last few months.