The Anisotropic App

Making invisible airflow legible in physical space.

Problem

Fluid behavior is difficult to build intuition for because velocity fields, pressure gradients, and transport mechanisms are invisible. Classroom demonstrations and textbook diagrams abstract away the spatial structure that makes flow problems genuinely anisotropic.

Technical Approach

The lab is developing a LiDAR-based AR tool that captures room-scale geometry via ARKit mesh reconstruction, then overlays a lightweight real-time CFD approximation mapped onto the captured surface. The stack is Swift on iOS, using LiDAR depth data to define boundary conditions and a simplified solver loop tuned for interactive frame rates rather than full Navier–Stokes fidelity.