Your Urban Playground

Inspiration

The problem: During early design, architects need to understand how a building’s shape, materials and structural layout might respond to forces. Static drawings make these relationships difficult to visualise, while detailed engineering analysis requires specialist tools and expertise. Why we’re building it: We want architects to explore structural ideas more intuitively, compare alternatives and identify questions to discuss with structural engineers before developing a design further. Our solution: My Urban Playground is an interactive 3D concept-testing website. Architects can customise structures by moving joints, changing materials and adding protective systems, then apply simulated disasters or targeted forces. Colour-coded members, measurements and model-aware guidance help explain the response and suggest changes to investigate. Our pitch: “Helping architects see how their design choices affect structural behaviour—before those ideas become buildings.” The current simulator supports early exploration; it does not replace validated engineering analysis or certify safety.

What it does

Your Urban Playground is a realistic physics simulator where users can create buildings, with an in-depth explanation system to improve structural stability including an accompanying AI chatbot which gives user tips on how best to improve their buildings. There are 28 presets which are based on real-life methods of disaster prevention, like counter-weights and damping. The website also comes with an extensive line inspection system, allowing the user to see the mass of the line, the axial force and axial stress the line is under, its state and governing limit, and length and utilization. Of course, the user can also choose to destroy everything that has been built using one of the pre-built disaster presets which accurately represent real-life disasters or destroy everything manually using the 'punch' option which sends a focused amount of force to a specific location or the 'shockwave' option which sends an even amount of force to the base of the building. In this process, the user can discover which parts of the building are under more strain and need more help through the color-coded line system, conduct small 'experiments' with different building shapes, gain some interesting results, and learn more and gain a more intuitive understanding of physics and engineering.

How we built it

I built a small prototype in Python with 3d Raytracing and the building-creation and block-destruction aspects. We gave that prototype to Codex, who converted it into a website and refined certain aspects.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging to preserve the accuracy of the physics and the impact of the disasters. We wanted to make sure that the disasters were accurate to real life but still impactful to the buildings.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the performance of the website as normal given how realistic it is. We struck a great middle ground between performance and accuracy, which results in my sub-optimal computer still being able to run the simulation at a manageable framerate.

What we learned

A key thing we learned was how to work with AI. AI will undoubtedly have a massive impact on the world around us, so it is important to learn how to use it early. Another thing we learned was physics. None of us knew what the words 'axial stress' meant in combination with one another, so this project really helped educate us as well.