Thanks to @gpjt, we were able to present some of our ideas at London WebGL Meetup. We gave presentation about how WebGL can (and most probably will) change architectural design.
Some more sources with info about the event:
Transcription:
I am going to show some slides and speak about architectural design and WebGL
the connection between the two is quite clear I think
I also think that this synergy could help revolutionize construction industry and redefine architectural design as we perceive it today
first I will tell you a little bit of my own experience and how I encountered WebGL
I have been doing quite a lot of 3D modeling
in the beginning at school and on various projects later on
I got to grasp how 3D modeling software works quite well and I find it really helpful now
geometry processing and rendering through a GPU is quite complex
so this experience was particularly useful when I started learning WebGL
most of mainstream 3D modeling programs have features that somewhat hint about fundamental ways computer generates graphics
I started programing at high school and really enjoyed it, but never got a chance to practice it again until recently
I got back to it after I read New Kind of Science by Steven Wolfram and I am sure some of you are aware of it
it heated up my imagination and I started thinking about how I could use computer to do architectural design in some smart way
I thought it would be interesting to try out some of computing methods for spacial and tectonic design
I was especially keen of trying out the intrinsic complexity of simple programs and how it could be applied for 3D applications
cellular automaton for example
here you can see a 2D cellular automaton with its memory rendered in a 3rd dimension
behaviour of virtual computer systems seemed to me fundamentally similar to natural processes and dynamics in our environment
some of you must have seen this parallel
while it seems like it has little to do with architecture I found this extremely relevant when I started writing in WebGL
so I started looking at available technologies at the time and realized that there was no good solution for simple computer experiments that could be easily shared online
there were 3D implementations on Adobe Flash, Java platforms but all of them didn’t seem simple and fundamental enough for a person with little developing experience
and then WebGL showed up
scary at first, but once I started I never looked back
tutorials online made it even easier and I owe a really big thanks to Giles for his lessons
here is some scary mathematics and geometry going on while trying to write an algorithm which generates WebGL buffer of a polygonal envelope in a demo I am about to show
ok but before that lets look at real world
I was living in South Africa for the past two years and saw this right next to me everyday
they just cant afford better
but maybe they would build it better for themselves, provided they could quickly get a generic design of a house on a smartphone
WebGL prototype demo
it still looks fairly primitive
it dynamically generates a simple lattice based model of single smallest component of 1 cubic decimeter
it then envelopes model lattice with a polygons and optimizes it by removing redundant geometry
I wanted to also demonstrate how the model itself could be dynamically generated from given parameters but ran out of time to implement an interface
I spent a lot of time debugging optimization algorithm to deal with WebGL buffer limit
with current specification there the amount of indeces of single piece of geometry is limited to 65k
this limit most probably is going to be removed in next versions of specification
to show you more at the moment I can only push one variable through php to show display wire-frame
as you can see the geometry could be optimized even more
Prototype wireframe view
let me show you one last slide with a design I have worked on some couple years ago
it would be possible to let application dynamically design a variety of different implementations of this orthogonal design