Urban Simulation Data 3D Visualisation with Game Engine

How do we visualise the unseen in the built environment, such as wind and heat?

As a Research Assistant (Visualisation) in Future Cities Lab's Simulation Platform, this was my task. Unity Game Engine was used, as we wanted to have something interactive, allowing public/urban planners to be engaged in the discussion.

• For the first project, I visualised Computational Fluid Dynamics simulation result from the engineers into 3D wind flow, and animated it line by line as data from each point in space and time is given.
• For the second project, heat emission from cars onto the roads and their surroundings were visualised and animated using cube visuals representing the temperature.
• User interaction for both projects needs to be well adapted to the large interactive display in the lab. For example, I explored the use of the Game Joystick Controller and Touch Display.
• I managed two student interns for each project, guiding them to code in Unity and take on different modules in the code.

Following are the videos and publications outcome.

• Cristie, V., & Berger, M. (2017). Game engines for urban exploration: Bridging science narrative for broader participants. In Playable Cities (pp. 87-107). Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1962-3_5
• Cristie, V., Berger, M., Bus, P., Kumar, A., & Klein, B. (2015) CityHeat: visualizing cellular automata-based traffic heat in Unity3D. In SIGGRAPH Asia 2015 Visualization in High Performance Computing (SA '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 6, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818517.2818527
• Berger, M., & Cristie, V. (2015). CFD Post-processing in Unity3D. Procedia Computer Science, 51, 2913-2922. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2015.05.476