Smart Building X VR System
The University of Sheffield’s Diamond building was designed to be a ’Smart Building’. As such, it contains approximately three thousand sensors which report data about the Diamonds internal environment, including temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, seat occupancy, lighting and heating status to a database called a Building Management System (BMS).
Given the quantity of data recorded in the Diamond’s BMS, simplex numerical figures of the building’s environment are difficult to understand. With that, understanding the optimum working conditions of the Diamond or diagnosing system faults are hard to comprehend, which can result in an uncomfortable and inefficient building environment.
The building’s constructors produced a highly detailed computerised CAD model of the Diamond. My aim of this project was to combine the building CAD model with the past and present data available in the BMS through 3D graphical visualisations via Virtual Reality (VR).
By marrying a computer games engine with a CAD model, I was able to create a 3D visualisation of the environmental performance of Sheffield University’s complex Diamond building. By observing from a computer screen or a VR headset, users can visualise snapshots of the room’s environment or watch an animation displaying the changes in a room’s environment over time.
A link to the paper I wrote can be found here. Thanks for reading!
Submitting my work to the CIBSE Technical Symposium 2019
Between the 25th and 26th April 2019, The CIBSE Technical Symposium 2019 was hosted at the University of Sheffield’s Diamond building.
My dissertation paper was submitted to The CIBSE Technical Symposium 2019 and I was invited to present at the symposium. My presentation and paper explaining how it was done was named the ‘Most Significant Contribution to the Art and Science of Building Services’ at the 2019 CIBSE Technical Symposium. Additionally, a magazine spread was written about my project in the CIBSE journal.
Further VR work with ARUP Design
On the basis of Virtual Reality Smart Building platform, I was contracted by the University of Sheffield and Arup to design and develop a VR system that provides intuitively visual representations of the internal and external environment of the University of Sheffield’s Diamond Smart Building. The graphical data visualisation techniques I designed aim to aid performance analysis of the ventilation system in the atrium of the building.
The system below enables representation of the Diamond’s outside environment, including, temperature, weather conditions, humidity, CO2 levels, wind direction and speed.