As the concept of energy can be complicated to understand, many questions might come to mind when looking at wind power: How much energy could 40 wind turbines generate? How many households could this power? How much CO2 emission could be avoided compared to other energy sources? How much wind is required for these turbines to work efficiently? But most importantly, what could a project like this visually look like?

During a discussion with Anastasios Gusha, we realised that our two respective fields might have interesting intersectional potential. Augmented Reality is a powerful visualisation tool that could have major practical utility use cases — The renewable energy sector has complex technologies that can be hard to grasp and comprehend, especially when their operation depends on many variables.

When developing this tool, we decided to prioritise utility and realistic visual simulation as core principles. We wanted to enable professionals and regular users alike to experiment and better understand how wind turbines work, what they could look like based on how far they are (distance), how tall they are based on the foundation type and power they produce, how big the farm is, and most importantly, how weather conditions could affect not only how they look but how they perform (wind, sun, temperature, rain). All these parameters can be controlled directly from the main UI panel.

Being able to utilise real-time live data is another element we decided to focus on. With the flip of a switch, our tool sends a request to AccuWeather’s API with the user’s approximate location, enabling us to factor in the local wind speed, temperature, rain coverage and cloud coverage, for a more realistic experience.