Many people are find it very hard to comprehend architectural plans, maps or diagrams. Cartographers have known this for many hundreds of years, possibly even thousands of years, and many early maps were created with huge amounts of artistic input, showing buildings, windmills, mountains and rivers as if seen from an oblique birdseye view. Indeed, it could be argued that the earliest 'maps' would have been scratched out by pre-historic hunters in the dust, with any available physical 3D objects used to represent features (pine cones for trees, rocks for mountains...). We live in a '3D' world, so it is not very surprising that if you rely on 2D plans or diagrams you can never be sure that you are communicating on the same wave length as your audience. 3D provides far more information; a ‘sense of being there’, and reaches the audience on a whole new level.

Bishopsgate, central London - even in the year 1553 cartographers knew that 3D helped people to understand maps.

3d models, 3d analysis
Steve has created 3D models of some of the richest and poorest parts of London, from Piccadilly Circus to Fishmongers Hall, London Bridge to deprived residential estates in Hackney and the East End. He has created 3D models of remote parts of Antarctica, in order to calculate the optimum position for a half a million pound aircraft control tower. He has created visualisations of past and future air pollution over London in 3D. He has helped the Met Office calculate the 'friction' that different parts of a city exerts on the weather as it passes over a city. The days of creating 3D models simply for the 'wow' factor, or simply 'because you can' are over. They are not just 'pretty' (yet dumb) models. They are used for analysis, to reduce risk, to ask important questions and to test scientific theories (read more)

Fishmongers Hall, London Bridge modelled in 3D

3d spatial history
3Figs has reconstructed 3D models of whole parts of London as they might have looked from the last Ice Age through Roman times, Medieval period, Regency times when the area began to become much more densely populated, though to visualisations of the terrifying speed with which the Victorian property developers covered the open fields with terraced houses. The devastation caused by the World War II bombs is visualised in detail thanks to the legacy of some of the bomb damage maps of London (a kind of 1945 GIS!) along with photos of the actual damage during the blitz.


View of historic or 4D model of part of London

The movies of the model show how a part of London, once fit for Roman Villas, slid slowly, but surely down the property ladder, from being literally fit for a King in 1700 to being known as 'Murder Mile' in 2006 due to the huge amount of gun crime. The power of 3D cannot be overstated here in communicating how places change over time. For several of these jobs, the end 'clients' have been children (since these were used in the end as educational resources) and children can be the harshest of critics, so the work has to capture their attention.

UK-GBC movie produced by 3Figs

3d planning permission
3Figs has created a number of 3D models to clarify the planning permission process, in order to help contractors, local authorities and interested parties know exactly what a new building will look like in context. Steve has worked with a whole range of clients here, from local community tennants associations, to architects and NGO's.

3d and the ideal building
3Figs has worked closely with Phil Steadman on his theory that you can boil the 3D geometry of every building down to a string of binary codes in order to process huge amounts of data in an extremely efficient manner. The code works out the amount of 'daylit' space as opposed to the 'artificially lit' space for buildings throughout the world. The software can generate 3D buildings from data from an Excel Spreadsheet (if correctly formatted) and has many potential uses including the possibility for enabling databases of 3D cities to be decimated in (disk) size. For more information on the theories behind the software, follow this link.

More screengrabs of the work are available on the news page.