Sensor Point Grids

The three-dimensional empty space of the site volume to be analysed, or the volumes around existing buildings to be renovated, or two-dimensional areas, are typically discretized into volumetric grids of sensor points. These grids, composed by tens of thousands of sensor-points, are distributed with a 3D spatial resolution ranging typically from 1 to 3 meters. The resolution, as well as the angle, height, and elevation can be freely parametrized. The tool offers also the gathering of legal boundaries, and offsetting features to consider setbacks in defining the buildable area.

To retrieve this data on sun, view, wind, and noise, for thousands of sensor points, that represent the empty-space of a site, we typically then need to run hundreds of thousands of simulations that require a massive computational power that is not available on a personal computer. To accelerate these computations and run them within a few minutes we exploit high-performance parallel cloud-computing and advanced big data management.
Finally, all the results of the simulation are integrated in a complex multi-dimensional multi-variate (MDMV) dataset according to the four spatio-temporal dimensions of the site (x,y,z,t) and to the multiple environmental variables that are simulated.

A flexible and interactive visualization framework allows then visualizing the computed values. A series of color-mapped volumetric tensor-fields and different visualization elements such as points, arrows, voxels, and various oriented surfaces and volumes enable different kinds of perceptions and interpretations at all the quantitative, volumetric, directional, and dynamic levels. As the complete display of all variates is obviously impossible, an interactive user interface allows for custom selection and filtration of the data.