Aalto Built Environment Laboratory

Aalto Built Environment Laboratory Facility

Aalto Built Environment Laboratory has its facilities in Urban Mill, the creative hub for urban innovations near Design Factory and Startup Sauna in Otaniemi. Urban Mill hosts a satellite of Espoo city planning office, start-ups, urban themed events and student projects.
Stairs landing in Dipoli with people sitting in two armchairs and looking at a painting / photo by Aalto University, Tuomas Uusheimo

Display array

The facility features a single large screen consisting of three wall-size segments(3360 x 2100 mm) and three short throw projectors. The aspect ratio of each projectors is 16:10, the aspect ratio of the whole setup being 48:10. The setup supports stereoscopic signal, which makes it possible to view realistic 3D material on the screens. Used either with ABE’s high performance PC which is able to run all screen segments in unison, or a laptop (one screen segment/laptop).

PC computer and HMD

ABE has a high performance PC to run material on the display array and a head-mounted display for viewing fully immersive 3D material.

Seats and desks

Urban Mill offers a wide selection of of chairs and tables for creating different constellations from traditional classroom organization to more co-operative shapes.

Aalto University/Unto Rautio

Using the space

Data visualizations in 2D

With data visualizations in 2D featuring for example knowledge-mashups or process information, decision-makers or stakeholders in a process are brought on the same page. Especially geolocated data benefits from the scale offered by the ABE facility. With multidimensional and complex geolocated data sets it can be helpful to view various maps simultaneously and compare them.

One can use any tools that run on a PC at ABE. Below are some templates with correct dimensions associated with the most common presenting tools.

Multi-user 3D visualization

Multi-user 3D visualizations can foster discussion and support decision-making especially about architectural and structural designs. At ABE, 3D visualization has also been experimented for artistic expression.

Advanced 3D visualization

Advanced immersive 3D visualization for one person is achieved with head-mounted displays (HMD). This type of immersive visualizations are useful for studying the user-reaction to a design. You can find tools for developing such models at the Oculus Rift developer page. HMD’s have been used so far at ABE in cruise ship interios design and prototyping a service environment. 

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