BOSTON — Earlybird Technology Inc. (www.stadia3d.com), an innovator in architectural visualization tools, has launched its first product, Stadia, at Autodesk University 2011 in Las Vegas, NV. Stadia is a software tool that draws from the Autodesk Revit building information model (BIM) to generate photorealistic virtual environments that can be freely explored, much like a video game.
The visualization tool aims to help architects and clients experience the physical, spatial, and temporal qualities of proposed architecture, as opposed to two-dimensional drawings, which are the current standard. These photorealistic virtual environments were not previously possible because industry standard raytracing rendering may take several hours to generate one frame. Through a patent-pending architectural rendering engine, Stadia is capable of generating photorealistic imagery in milliseconds, faster than the human mind can perceive.
“The way we represent proposed architecture has a big impact on its development and the success of a project,” said Robert Pogue, the 20-year-old founder and CEO of Earlybird Technology. “Stadia aims to give simple and expressive tools to architects so that they can tell more compelling visual stories.” Stadia sends building information modeling data from Revit to the cloud for computation. Users are then e-mailed a downloadable file, which contains the interactive rendering that produces imagery in real-time, allowing users to walk through the building as if it was already built. The technology has been in closed beta at some of Boston’s top architecture firms since July 2011, including SMMA and ADD Inc.
“Interdisciplinary collaboration is a major defining characteristic of SMMA’s design practice,” said Timothy Lear, BIM Specialist at SMMA. “To achieve this, we use Stadia as an advanced design tool—helping us communicate our interpretation and understanding of our client’s vision through detailed three dimensional models. Furthermore, Stadia provides our project teams a mechanism, which enhances the collaborative environment through detailed visualizations—adding value to our iterative design process.”
Stadia is currently available as a site license subscription and can be downloaded as an add-in for Revit.