DATA VISUALISATION | THE DIAMOND BUILDING By combining a BIM model with a computer games engine, James Milton was able to create a 3D visualisation of the environmental performance of Sheffield Universitys Diamond building. He explains how the system can be used with virtual reality headsets to help facilities managers identify environmental trends and diagnose building faults PLAYING TO WIN T he University of Sheffields Diamond building is home to 5,000 students from the Faculty of Engineering, and was the venue for this years CIBSE Technical Symposium. It was designed as a smart building and contains approximately 3,000 sensors, which report data about the internal environment continously. Temperature, humidity, CO2 levels, seat occupancy, lighting and the heating status are all recorded by the building management system (BMS). Screenshots taken from a video demonstration of the final product. The user is looking around the scene and inspecting the graphical visualisations. They move their head to control the camera angle and use a hand-held controller to traverse the scene, which is being displayed to the Oculus Rift worn by the user and to the desktop screen. The video demonstration can be viewed at http://bit.ly/CJJun19JM Given the quantity of data recorded, it is not easy to understand the state of the buildings environment using simple numerical figures. This means achieving the optimum working conditions of the Diamond or diagnosing system faults is not always straightforward, and can potentially lead to an uncomfortable and inefficient building environment. While studying computer science at the University of Sheffield, I investigated a solution to this problem as part of my finalyear dissertation project, supervised by Dr Ramsay Taylor. With the aim of improving the understanding of the Diamonds internal environmental data, this project combined its building information model (BIM) with the buildings data in 3D graphical visualisations, or virtual reality (VR). The end result was an interactive system that graphically simulates the internal environment of two uniquely structured rooms within the Diamond. This was done by combining the data from its BMS database with an optimised version of Diamonds BIM within the game-development platform Unity. By observing through a computer screen or VR headset, users can visualise snapshots of the rooms environment or watch an animation displaying changes over time. The application was evaluated by anonymous participants and staff from the University of Sheffields Estates and Facilities Management department, who completed a survey after experiencing it first-hand. It was found that the implemented system improved the understanding of 28 June 2019 www.cibsejournal.com CIBSE Jun19 pp28-29 VR James Milton.indd 28 24/05/2019 16:21